CS 581 (Fall 2022) Final Project Suggestions
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The textbook (Computational Phylogenetics: An Introduction
to Designing Methods for Phylogeny Estimation) has several
suggestions for
projects, many of which would be good for this course.
You may also have your own ideas for a project!
The suggestions below are just to get you started with thinking
about what you might do.
(Note, however, that some projects--especially those that
evaluate and explore Bayesian methods, may be too computationally
intensive to do as a course project, and would be better as a
post-581 project.)
Also, please note that the course project is evaluated with
respect to writing (including style, low-level writing, and reproducibility)
as well as the content.
Writing counts 25% of the grade!
Specific projects of interest to me (TW)
- Projects related to TIPP (https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btu721)
- Evaluate taxon identification methods, comparing
methods that place into taxonomies to methods that place
into a gene tree and then inherit
the taxonomic information from the leaf labels.
- Projects related to gene and species tree estimation
- Test GTM (https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-020-6605-1) in a pipeline with methods other than maximum likelihood
(e.g., neighbor joining or FastME).
- Test GTM (https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-020-6605-1) and TreeMerge (https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz344), two Disjoint Tree Merger methods,
under conditions with different model tree topologies (balanced vs.
caterpillar).
More generally, see if you can find a condition where GTM is less
accurate than TreeMerge.
- Develop a new Disjoint Tree Merger pipeline and test
it in comparison to GTM
- Develop a new quartet amalgamation method
and compare to Quartets Max Cut (DOI: 10.1109/TCBB.2008.133)
- Evaluate impact of species tree shape on methods for estimating trees or
rooting trees.
- Evaluate methods for generating random trees in terms of their
tree shapes (and see previous item).
- Develop techniques for rooting gene trees with respect to
species trees that are not fully resolved (expand on ideas in NOTUNG)
-
Evaluate methods for tree construction in the presence of rogue taxa (that are nevertheless homologs)
- Projects related to ensembles of HMMs
- Develop a rigorous way of designing ensembles of profile HMMs (think
cross-validation)
- Extend design or use of ensemble of HMMs in some interesting way (e.g., use
some other generative model, or define a mixture model)
- Projects related to multiple sequence alignment (MSA)
- Modify the MAGUS design by using a different clustering method
instead of the Markov Clustering algorithm.
- Evaluate UPP and other existing MSA methods on datasets with sequence length
heterogeneity where some sequences are very long (and possibly
design a new method that addresses this problem better)
- Develop and test methods for merging three or more disjoint alignments of different lengths (compare to GCM in MAGUS)
- Test Prank in comparison to MAFFT as evolutionary diameter
and deviation from a clock increase, when
given a guide tree
- Evaluate Prank or Probcons within PASTA or MAGUS, and compare
to default MAGUS and PASTA
- Compare Regressive (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0333-6) to PASTA
and MAGUS
- Parallel algorithms projects:
- Parallelize UPP (multiple sequence alignment, by Nam-phuong Nguyen et al.)
- Parallelize GTM (Guide Tree Merger, by Vlad Smirnov and me)
- Parallelize Balanced Minimum Evolution within FastME
- Historical linguistics
- Run maximum likelihood methods on simulated data for
language evolution
(check with me)
Projects related to multiple sequence alignment
- Modify the sequence evolution simulator Indelible
(Fletcher and Yang) so that it allows
the root sequence to be specified.
The code is open source and written in C++.
- Compare methods that can align two or more alignments, and evaluate
for accuracy on simulated datasets.
Examples of such methods: Opal, Muscle, Prime, and GCM.
- Test POY using gap penalties that are not affine gap penalties
for accuracy.
- Examine ways of computing a consensus alignment on the output from
PASTA, and evaluate for accuracy in comparison to the single alignment
returned by PASTA.
For example, compute the posterior
decoding of a random sample of the alignments PASTA computes (after
removing the first few alignments).
To compute the posterior decoding, you can install
BAli-Phy (Redelings and Suchard), using
the directions on the website:
http://balip-phy.org/README.html#installation.
Once the software is installed, there is a folder of
executable files called "bin", and within that
folder
there is a folder called "alignment-max".
-
Examine ways to annotate the sites in a multiple sequence alignment
for reliability, based on examining
a set of alternate alignments obtained
by running a basic alignment method using different strategies
(e.g., different parameter settings).
-
Find codes for computing a point estimate of
an alignment given
an arbitrary set of multiple sequence alignments
(e.g., the posterior decoding algorithm in BAli-Phy, but also
look at T-Coffee), and compare them for accuracy and/or scalability.
-
Explore BAli-Phy to see if you can improve it.
For example, determine if you can use it
to find a tree given a fixed alignment.
or to find the best alignment on a fixed tree.
-
In "Benchmarking statistical multiple sequence alignment" (bioRxiv doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/304659), my students and I showed a strange trend in which
BAli-Phy did very well on simulated
amino acid
datasets but not very well
on biological amino acid datasets.
Try to do this evaluation on nucleotide datasets.
- Evaluate the impact of violating the strict molecular clock on
either multiple sequence alignment or phylogenetic tree estimation,
especially when using statistical methods (such as
BAli-Phy, Prank, etc.).
Projects related to supertree estimation or phylogenomic species tree estimation
- Develop a good method for weighted quartet tree amalgamation.
Compare to Weighted Quartets MaxCut by Avni et al. (2014),
DOI: 10.1093/sysbio/syu087.
-
Evaluate Weighted Quartets MaxCut (Avni et al. 2014)
as a supertree method on the SMIDgen datasets (Swenson et al.).
-
Implement a parallel version of some good supertree method, such as
FastRFS (Vachaspati and Warnow),
Quartets MaxCut (Snir and Rao), etc.
-
Quartet-based supertree methods have computational limitations
in that they depend on computing all quartet trees.
Evaluate variants that
only require computing a subset of the quartet trees.
-
Evaluate the impact of multiple sequence alignment error on
SVDquartets (Chifman and Kubatko, as implemented in PAUP*).
Projects related to maximum likelihood gene tree estimation
- Evaluate the impact of the starting tree on FastTree-2.
- ML methods have been explored in terms of the impact of the
tree topology or the ML score, and in general RAxML has been
found to be better than other methods for ML score but only rarely
better than FastTree-2 in terms of tree topology.
Try to characterize the conditions in which RAxML is generally
more accurate than FastTree-2 (or other ML methods) for tree topology.
- Modify some maximum likelihood method to take support values
per site into account.
- Develop a new Disjoint Tree Merger (DTM) method, and test it
in comparison to GTM.
- Evaluate the impact of violating the strict molecular clock on
on phylogenetic tree estimation,
especially when using statistical methods such as
BAli-Phy.
- Evaluate the impact of tree shape (e.g., the Aldous beta-splitting
model) on tree estimation.
Other
- Develop a method that can compute a tree from an
incomplete dissimilarity
matrix (i.e., matrices where some of the entries
do not have
values).
Compare to the "NJ*" methods from
Criscuolo and Gascuel (2008),
https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-9-166,
on some simulated datasets.
- Find an application area (other than
biological phylogenetics) where tree estimation (especially of
large datasets) is important and not necessarily solved well,
and where accuracy can be measured.
Try to develop a new approach to tree estimation,
and compare to the current best methods.
- Explore the "ensemble of profile HMMs" approach
with some other generative model
or some other biological application
-
Develop a method that performs taxon identification of
sequences
that takes the following as input:
a taxonomy T and a tree T' in which
all but one of the leaves is assigned
a taxonomic label using T.
Test your method
where T' is produced by adding
a single short sequence (i.e., read) into
an estimated maximum likelihood
tree on full length sequences for a single gene.
Thus, your method will rely on a phylogenetic placement
method.
-
Develop a divide-and-conquer approach to phylogenetic
network estimation, and test it.
-
Test divide-and-conquer DTM methods for use
with genome rearrangement phylogeny estimation methods.
-
Find some published dataset and re-analyze it
using the new methods for phylogeny estimation
(either gene trees or species trees).