Generalized Markov branching trees

Abstract

Abstract Motivated by the gene tree/species tree problem from statistical phylogenetics, we extend the class of Markov branching trees to a parametric family of distributions on fragmentation trees that satisfies a generalized Markov branching property. The main theorems establish important statistical properties of this model, specifically necessary and sufficient conditions under which a family of trees can be constructed consistently as sample size grows. We also consider the question of attaching random edge lengths to these trees.