Can one hear the shape of a population history?
Populations and Evolution
2014-09-30 v2 Statistics Theory
Statistics Theory
Abstract
Reconstructing past population size from present day genetic data is a major goal of population genetics. Recent empirical studies infer population size history using coalescent-based models applied to a small number of individuals. Here we provide tight bounds on the amount of exact coalescence time data needed to recover the population size history of a single, panmictic population at a certain level of accuracy. In practice, coalescence times are estimated from sequence data and so our lower bounds should be taken as rather conservative.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1402.2424,
title = {Can one hear the shape of a population history?},
author = {Junhyong Kim and Elchanan Mossel and Miklós Z. Rácz and Nathan Ross},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1402.2424},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
22 pages, 7 figures; v2 is significantly revised from v1