Equivariant tree models are statistical models used in the reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from genetic data. Here equivariant§ refers to a symmetry group imposed on the root distribution and on the transition matrices in the model. We prove that if that symmetry group is Abelian, then the Zariski closures of these models are defined by polynomial equations of bounded degree, independent of the tree. Moreover, we show that there exists a polynomial-time membership test for that Zariski closure....

An iterative fuzzy clustering method is proposed to partition a set of multivariate binary observation vectors located at neighboring geographic sites. The method described here applies in a binary setup a recently proposed algorithm, called Neighborhood EM, which seeks a partition that is both well clustered in the feature space and spatially regular [AmbroiseNEM1996]. This approach is derived from the EM algorithm applied to mixture models [Dempster1977], viewed as an alternate optimization method...