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X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:OEB Seminar Series: Liam Revell
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SUMMARY:OEB Seminar Series: Liam Revell
DESCRIPTION:<p><a href="https://faculty.umb.edu/liam.revell/">Liam Revell</a>&nbsp;<br>Professor of Biology&nbsp;<br>University of Massachusetts, Boston</p><p><em>Unlocking a flexible set of new models for discrete &amp; continuous trait evolution in phylogenetic comparative biology</em></p><p><strong>Abstract:</strong> The <span>practical utility of many modern phylogenetic comparative methods can depend on how accurately mathematical models capture the evolutionary process of traits. In a nearly decade-old paper, Boucher and Démery (2016) identified an interesting utility of the equivalence of an equal-rates, symmetric, ordered Markov chain and continuous stochastic diffusion (in the limit as the number of steps in our chain goes to ∞) for fitting a model with no tractable analytic likelihood function -- in their case, Brownian motion with reflecting boundaries. Professor Revell refers to this equivalence as the discretized diffusion approximation. He subsequently realized that this approximation could help unlock a number of other new or intractable models in the phylogenetic comparative analysis of discrete and continuous trait data, some of which he will explore in this presentation.</span></p><p><strong>Host:</strong> Professor Cavender-Bares</p>
LOCATION:Northwest Building, B101, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
STATUS:CONFIRMED
DTSTART:20251023T193000Z
DTEND:20251023T203000Z
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