We present a method for reconstructing evolutionary trees from high-dimensional data, with a specific application to bird song spectrograms. We address the challenge of inferring phylogenetic relationships from phenotypic traits, like vocalizations, without predefined acoustic properties. Our approach combines two main components: Poincaré embeddings for dimensionality reduction and distance computation, and the neighbour-joining algorithm for tree reconstruction. Unlike previous work, we employ Siamese networks to learn embeddings from only leaf node samples of the latent tree. We demonstrate our method’s effectiveness on both synthetic data and spectrograms from six species of finches.

Consider a continuous-time Markov process with transition rates matrix Q in the state space Λ ⋃ {0}. In the associated Fleming-Viot process N particles evolve independently in Λ with transition rates matrix Q until one of them attempts to jump to state 0. At this moment the particle jumps to one of the positions of the other particles, chosen uniformly at random. When Λ is finite, we show that the empirical distribution of the particles at a fixed time converges as N → ∞ to the distribution of a single particle at the same time conditioned on not touching {0}. Furthermore, the empirical profile of the unique invariant measure for the Fleming-Viot process with N particles converges as N → ∞ to the unique quasistationary distribution of the one-particle motion. A key element of the approach is to show that the two-particle correlations are of order 1 / N.

We study the asymptotic behavior of a semi-discrete numerical approximation for a pair of heat equations ut = Δu, vt = Δv in Ω x (0,T); fully coupled by the boundary conditions $\frac{\partial u}{\partial\eta} = u^{p_{11}}v^{p_{12}}$ , $\frac{\partial v}{\partial\eta} = u^{p_{21}}v^{p_{22}}$ on ∂Ω x (0,T), where Ω is a bounded smooth domain in ${\mathbb{R}}^d$ . We focus in the existence or not of non-simultaneous blow-up for a semi-discrete approximation (U,V). We prove that if U blows up in finite time then V can fail to blow up if and only if p 11 > 1 and p 21 < 2(p 11 - 1), which is the same condition as the one for non-simultaneous blow-up in the continuous problem. Moreover, we find that if the continuous problem has non-simultaneous blow-up then the same is true for the discrete one. We also prove some results about the convergence of the scheme and the convergence of the blow-up times.