Identifiability of large phylogenetic mixture models

Phylogenetic mixture models are statistical models of character evolution allowing for heterogeneity. Each of the classes in some unknown partition of the characters may evolve by different processes, or even along different trees. Such models are of increasing interest for data analysis, as they can capture the variety of evolutionary processes that may be occurring across long sequences of DNA or proteins. The fundamental question of whether parameters of such a model are identifiable is difficult to address, due to the complexity of the parameterization. Identifiability is, however, essential to their use for statistical inference.We analyze mixture models on large trees, with many mixture components, showing that both numerical and tree parameters are indeed identifiable in these models when all trees are the same. This provides a theoretical justification for some current empirical studies, and indicates that extensions to even more mixture components should be theoretically well behaved. We also extend our results to certain mixtures on different trees, using the same algebraic techniques.