Date of Award
5-17-2014
Document Type
Thesis
Abstract
In this thesis we develop an intuitive process of encoding any phylogenetic tree and its associated tree-distance matrix as a collection of points in Euclidean space. Using this encoding, we find that information about the structure of the tree can easily be recovered by applying the inner product operation to vector combinations of the Euclidean points. By applying Classical Scaling to the tree-distance matrix, we are able to find the Euclidean points even when the phylogenetic tree is not known. We use the insight gained by encoding the tree as a collection of Euclidean points to modify the Neighbor Joining Algorithm, a method to recover an unknown phylogenetic tree from its tree-distance matrix, to be more resistant to tree-distance proportional errors.
Recommended Citation
Layer, Mark, "Phylogenetic trees and Euclidean embeddings" (2014). Mathematics and Statistics . 2.
https://ualaska.researchcommons.org/uaf_grad_math_stats/2
Handle
http://hdl.handle.net/11122/4573