Phylogenetic mixtures: Concentration of measure in the large-tree limit

Abstract

The reconstruction of phylogenies from DNA or protein sequences is a major task of computational evolutionary biology. Common phenomena, notably variations in mutation rates across genomes and incongruences between gene lineage histories, often make it necessary to model molecular data as originating from a mixture of phylogenies. Such mixed models play an increasingly important role in practice.

Using concentration of measure techniques, we show that mixtures of large trees are typically identifiable. We also derive sequence-length requirements for high-probability reconstruction.