Summary: The Posterior Probability Distribution of Alignments
and its Application to Parameter Estimation of Evolutionary Trees
and to Optimisation of Multiple Alignments.
L. Allison & C. S. Wallace,
Department of Computer Science,
Monash University,
Australia 3168.
email: lloyd@cs.monash.edu.au
This work is partly supported by an Australian Research Council grant.
June 1993, revised March 1994, accepted May 1994.
Abstract: It is shown how to sample alignments from their posterior probability distribution given two
strings. This is extended to sampling alignments of more than two strings. The result is firstly applied to
the estimation of the edges of a given evolutionary tree over several strings. Secondly, when used in
conjunction with simulated annealing, it gives a stochastic search method for an optimal multiple
alignment.
Key words and phrases: alignment, estimation, evolutionary tree, Gibbs sampling, inductive inference,
Monte­Carlo method, multiple alignment, sampling, stochastic.
Jrnl. Molec. Evol. 39 418­430 1994

1994 The Posterior Probability Distribution of Alignments ­2­

Source: Allison, Lloyd - Caulfield School of Information Technology, Monash University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences