Algorithmic Advances and Implementation Challenges: Developing Practical Tools for Phylogenetic Inference

In this workshop, we will consider challenges and best practices in translating theory to software for phylogenetic inference. We will discuss strategies adopted by the tool development community, their relative advantages, and lessons learned through software development. We will discuss a variety of objective functions (parametric and non-parametric) and algorithmic techniques used by inference methods. We will cover parallelization and how it interacts with the choice of objective function and algorithmic technique. Finally, we will discuss best practices for evaluating new and existing software tools, not just to validate the implementation but also to study accuracy and scalability in relation to theory and usage in realistic bioinformatics pipelines. In addition to discussing how theory influences tools, we will examine how tool development can inform the theoretical questions asked.

Topics: bioinformatics, phylogenetic inference, software development