HRI Science Seminar Series - "Bioinformatics: Exploratory data analysis using phylogenetic trees and networks"

Seminar
Starts
November 29, 2018
3:30 pm
Ends
November 29, 2018
4:30 pm
Venue
Harte Research Institute
Conference Room 127
6300 Ocean Drive, Corpus Christi, TX 78412

Dr. Klaus Schliep
Department of Biology
University of Massachusetts - Boston

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is a statistical approach to summarize the main characteristics of a dataset through visualizations. EDA is increasingly used to detect unexpected patterns or deviations from model assumptions and to generate hypotheses. Phylogenetic trees are complex data structures and thus visualizing data on these objects in a meaningful and useful way can be challenging. I will present some recent work on exploratory visualization tools for phylogenetic comparative methods that integrate phylogenetic and phenotypic data to make inferences about patterns of evolution. Additionally, I will explore the use of phylogenetic networks to highlight congruence between sample of phylogenetic trees generated, for example, by a bootstrap or Bayesian MCMC analysis. The ability to easily combine phylogenies with information from other sources should strengthen inferences about evolutionary processes.

Dr. Schliep is a bioinformatician and currently a postdoctoral research associate in the Revell Lab at University of Massachusetts Boston. He did his PhD at Massey University in New Zealand where he studied Biomathematics. He is the author of the well-known bioinformatics tool phangorn (already 815 citations after its publication in 2011). His research interests focus on developing mathematical and computational methods for evolutionary biology. He is currently focused on computational infrastructure for phylogenetic and macroevolutionary analysis in the R environment (as part of a NSF ABI Development grant).