Necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent root reconstruction in Markov models on trees

Abstract: We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent root reconstruction in continuous-time Markov models with countable state space on bounded-height trees. Here a root state estimator is said to be consistent if the probability that it returns to the true root state converges to 1 as the number of leaves tends to infinity. We also derive quantitative bounds on the error of reconstruction. Our results answer a question of Gascuel and Steel and have implications for ancestral sequence reconstruction in a classical evolutionary model of nucleotide insertion and deletion.