Building mixture trees from binary sequence data
Shu-Chuan Chen and Bruce G. Lindsay
Abstract: This article develops a new method for building a hierarchical tree from binary sequence data. It is based on an ancestral mixture model. The sieve parameter in the model plays the role of time in the evolutionary tree of the sequences. By sliding the sieve parameter, one can create a hierarchical tree that estimates the population structure at each fixed backward point in time. A case study of clustering the Mitochondrial DNA sequences of Griffiths and Tavare (1994) is used to show that the approach performs well. In addition, theoretical and computational properties of the ancestral mixture model are further developed.
Key Words and Phrases: Ancestral mixture model; Evolutionary tree; Hierarchical tree; Sieve parameter.