English

Multi-type $\Xi$-coalescents from structured population models with bottlenecks

Probability 2025-04-17 v1 Populations and Evolution

Abstract

We introduce an individual-based model for structured populations undergoing demographic bottlenecks, i.e. drastic reductions in population size that last many generations and can have arbitrary shapes. We first show that the (non-Markovian) allele-frequency process converges to a Markovian diffusion process with jumps in a suitable relaxation of the Skorokhod J1 topology. Backward in time we find that genealogies of samples of individuals are described by multi-type Ξ\Xi-coalescents presenting multiple simultaneous mergers with simultaneous migrations. These coalescents are also moment-duals of the limiting jump diffusions. We then show through a numerical study that our model is flexible and can predict various shapes for the site frequency spectrum, consistent with real data, using a small number of interpretable parameters.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.11875,
  title  = {Multi-type $\Xi$-coalescents from structured population models with bottlenecks},
  author = {Marta Dai Pra and Alison Etheridge and Jere Koskela and Maite Wilke-Berenguer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.11875},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

39 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:00:12.701Z