Tropical geometry of phylogenetic tree spaces

Abstract: The Billera-Holmes-Vogtmann (BHV) space is a well-studied moduli space of phylogenetic trees that appears in many scientific disciplines, including computational biology, computer vision, combinatorics, and category theory. Speyer and Sturmfels identify a homeomorphism between BHV space and a version of the Grassmannian using tropical geometry, endowing the space of phylogenetic trees with a tropical structure, which turns out to be advantageous for computational studies. In this talk, I will present the coincidence between BHV space and the tropical Grassmannian. I will then give an overview of some recent work I have done that studies the tropical Grassmannian as a metric space and the practical implications of these results on probabilistic and statistical studies on real datasets of phylogenetic trees.

algebraic geometrycombinatorics

Audience: researchers in the topic

Tropical Geometry in Frankfurt/Zoom TGiF/Z

Series comments: Description: An afternoon seminar series on tropical geometry, known as the TGiZ ("Tropical Geometry in Zoom") or the TGiF ("Tropical Geometry in Frankfurt") seminar.

Please send an email to one of the organizers at the latest one day before a session if you wish to receive the Zoom link and password.

Videos of some past talks are available on YouTube here, while some slides can be found here.