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SUMMARY:Monkeys on Trees: A Bayesian Approach to Inferring Primate Diverge
 nce Times\n - Richard Wilkinson\, Centre for Mathematical Sciences
DTSTART:20070214T140000Z
DTEND:20070214T150000Z
UID:TALK6717@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Danielle Stretch
DESCRIPTION:In order to estimate the age of the primates\, it is necessary
  to \nuse the fossil record. The fossil record\, however\, is incomplete a
 nd so the \nage of the oldest primate fossil can only give a lower bound o
 n the age of \nthe primates. In this talk I give a modelling approach to e
 stimating \nspecies divergence times\, concentrating on the primates.\n\nD
 ue to the nature of the branching process model that we use\, we are unabl
 e \nto compute the likelihood function and are thus unable to use standard
  \ninference techniques such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Instead\,
  I \nwill present a simple likelihood free method known as Approximate Bay
 esian \nComputation (ABC) and an extension where I embedded ABC into an MC
 MC \nframework.
LOCATION:MR5\, DAMTP
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