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Activity Number: 460
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2007 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: IMS
Abstract - #309021
Title: The Evolutionary Forest
Author(s): Scotland Leman*+
Companies: Duke University
Address: 1800 Shelton Ave, Durham, NC, 27707,
Keywords: Bayesian ; MCMC ; Phylogeny ; Population Biology
Abstract:

We describe a Markov chain Monte Carlo method for approximating the joint posterior distribution of parameters for evolutionary and other complex processes. Proposal distributions on complex structures such as phylogenies are essential for MCMC sampling methods. However, such proposal distributions are difficult to construct so that their probability distribution match that of the true target distribution, in turn hampering the efficiency of the overall MCMC scheme. We'll describe a data augmentation scheme that converges rapidly to the population parameters of interest, while utilizing a simple independent proposal distribution on individual trees. In this approach, we rely on an ensemble of histories (a forest of genealogical trees) rather than a single history. This enables the exploration of the augmented tree space (forest space) to proceed quickly and converge rapidly.


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Revised September, 2007