Efficient Inference in Phylogenetic InDel Trees

Accurate and efficient inference in evolutionary trees is a central problem in computational biology. While classical treatments have made unrealistic site independence assumptions, ignoring insertions and deletions, realistic approaches require tracking insertions and deletions along the phylogenetic tree—a challenging and unsolved computational problem. We propose a new ancestry resampling procedure for inference in evolutionary trees. We evaluate our method in two problem domains—multiple sequence alignment and reconstruction of ancestral sequences—and show substantial improvement over the current state of the art.