Studying Morphological Variation: Exploring the Shape Space in Evolutionary Anthropology

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira, Daubechies, Ingrid
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira
Daubechies, Ingrid
author_facet Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira
Daubechies, Ingrid
contents We present results of a long-term team collaboration of mathematicians and biologists. We focus on building a mathematical framework for the shape space constituted by a collection of homologous bones or teeth from many species. The biological application is to quantitative morphological understanding of the evolutionary history of primates in particular, and mammals more generally. Similar to the practice of biologists, we leverage the power of the whole collection for results that are more robust than can be obtained by only pairwise comparisons, using tools from differential geometry and machine learning. This paper concentrates on the mathematical framework. We review methods for comparing anatomical surfaces, discuss the problem of registration and alignment, and address the computation of different distances. Next, we cover broader questions related to cross-dataset landmark selection, shape segmentation, and shape classification analysis. This paper summarizes the work of many team members other than the authors; in this paper that unites (for the first time) all their results in one joint context, space restrictions prevent a full description of the mathematical details, which are thoroughly covered in the original articles. Although our application is to the study of anatomical surfaces, we believe our approach has much wider applicability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_20040
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Studying Morphological Variation: Exploring the Shape Space in Evolutionary Anthropology
Faigenbaum-Golovin, Shira
Daubechies, Ingrid
Numerical Analysis
We present results of a long-term team collaboration of mathematicians and biologists. We focus on building a mathematical framework for the shape space constituted by a collection of homologous bones or teeth from many species. The biological application is to quantitative morphological understanding of the evolutionary history of primates in particular, and mammals more generally. Similar to the practice of biologists, we leverage the power of the whole collection for results that are more robust than can be obtained by only pairwise comparisons, using tools from differential geometry and machine learning. This paper concentrates on the mathematical framework. We review methods for comparing anatomical surfaces, discuss the problem of registration and alignment, and address the computation of different distances. Next, we cover broader questions related to cross-dataset landmark selection, shape segmentation, and shape classification analysis. This paper summarizes the work of many team members other than the authors; in this paper that unites (for the first time) all their results in one joint context, space restrictions prevent a full description of the mathematical details, which are thoroughly covered in the original articles. Although our application is to the study of anatomical surfaces, we believe our approach has much wider applicability.
title Studying Morphological Variation: Exploring the Shape Space in Evolutionary Anthropology
topic Numerical Analysis
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.20040