e5f6ad6ce374177eef023bf5d0c018b6-Reviews.html

First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. This paper develops a model for multifurcating trees with edge lengths and observed data at the tree leaves; the model is based on the beta coalescent from the probability literature. The authors develop an MCMC inference scheme for their model, in which they draw on existing work that uses belief propagation to perform inference for the Kingman coalescent (an edge case of the beta coalescent in which all trees are binary). The particular challenge for inference here is that there are many more possible parent-child node relationships when parents can have multiple children (not just two). The authors seem to use a Dirichlet Process mixture model (DPMM) at each node to narrow down the space of possible children subsets to consider. As the authors note, even inference with the Kingman coalescent is a hard problem. In experiments, they compare to the Kingman coalescent and hierarchical agglomerative clustering. The Kingman coalescent is a popular modeling tool, so it is great to see a practical extension of the Kingman coalescent to the multifurcating case being explored for inference.