An evolutionary tree is a rooted tree where each internal node has two children and the leaves are labeled with distinct symbols representing species.
Evolutionary trees are useful for modeling the evolutionary history of species.
This talk will discuss an ongoing project to develop a multilevel integrated platform for constructing evolutionary trees from biological sequence data and extracting information from these trees. The discussion will focus on recent algorithmic results on two prototypical problems. We will first discuss how to construct evolutionary trees from relatively short DNA sequences with provable accuracy guarantees. Different theories or data sets about the evolutionary history of the same species may result in different evolutionary trees. A basic problem in biology is to determine how consistent certain theories or data sets are.