Mixture Tree Construction and Its Applications

• Activity Number: 284
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 3, 2010 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Biometrics Section
• Author(s): Shu-Chuan Chen*+
• Companies: Arizona State University
• Keywords: Single Nucleotide Polymorphism ; ancestral mixture model ; Mixture tree

Abstract

A new method for building a gene tree from Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) data was developed by Chen and Lindsay, 2006. Called the mixture tree, it was based on an ancestral mixture model. The sieve parameter in the model plays the role of time in the evolutionary tree of the sequences. By varying the sieve parameter, one can create a hierarchical tree that estimates the population structure at each fixed backward point in time. A software, called MixtureTree, was developed for this purpose. In this talk, we will review the model and then present an application to the clustering of the mitochondrial sequences using the mixture tree software to show that the approach performs well. We will simulate real SNPs sequences with known ancestral history to compare the mixture trees with true trees to evaluate how well the mixture tree method performs. Comparison with some existing metho