University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Statistics Papers Wharton Faculty Research 2-2011 Evolutionary Trees and the Ising Model on the Bethe Lattice: A Proof of Steel’s Conjecture Constantinos Daskalakis Elchanan Mossel University of Pennsylvania Sébastien Roch Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/statistics_papers Part of the Biostatistics Commons Recommended Citation Daskalakis, C., Mossel, E., & Roch, S. (2011). Evolutionary Trees and the Ising Model on the Bethe Lattice: A Proof of Steel’s Conjecture. Probability Theory and Related Fields, 149 (1), 149-189. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s00440-009-0246-2 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/statistics_papers/530 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Evolutionary Trees and the Ising Model on the Bethe Lattice: A Proof of Steel’s Conjecture Abstract A major task of evolutionary biology is the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from molecular data. The evolutionary model is given by a Markov chain on a tree. Given samples from the leaves of the Markov chain, the goal is to reconstruct the leaf-labelled tree. It is well known that in order to reconstruct a tree on n leaves, sample sequences of length Ω(log n) are needed. It was conjectured by Steel that for the CFN/Ising evolutionary model, if the mutation probability on all edges of the tree is less than p∗=(√2−1)/23/2 , then the tree can be recovered from sequences of length O(log n). The value p* is given by the transition point for the extremality of the free Gibbs measure for the Ising model on the binary tree.