Abstract:  Phylogenetic trees are mathematical objects of great importance used to model hierarchical data and evolutionary relationships with applications in many fields including evolutionary biology and genetic epidemiology. Bayesian phylogenetic inference usually explore the posterior distribution of trees via Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, however assessing uncertainty and summarizing distributions remains challenging for these types of structures. In this talk I will first introduce a distance metric on the space of unlabeled ranked tree shapes and genealogies. I will then…

Abstract: We consider the problem of sequential probability assignment in the Gaussian setting, where one aims to predict (or equivalently compress) a sequence of real-valued observations almost as well as the best Gaussian distribution with mean constrained to a general domain. First, in the case of a convex constraint set K, we express the hardness of the prediction problem (the minimax regret) in terms of the intrinsic volumes of K. We then establish a comparison inequality for the minimax regret…