English

The Sampled Moran Genealogy Process

Populations and Evolution 2020-10-21 v3 Probability Applications

Abstract

We define the Sampled Moran Genealogy Process, a continuous-time Markov process on the space of genealogies with the demography of the classical Moran process, sampled through time. To do so, we begin by defining the Moran Genealogy Process using a novel representation. We then extend this process to include sampling through time. We derive exact conditional and marginal probability distributions for the sampled process under a stationarity assumption, and an exact expression for the likelihood of any sequence of genealogies it generates. This leads to some interesting observations pertinent to existing phylodynamic methods in the literature. Throughout, our proofs are original and make use of strictly forward-in-time calculations and are exact for all population sizes and sampling processes.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.11184,
  title  = {The Sampled Moran Genealogy Process},
  author = {Aaron A. King and Qianying Lin and Edward L. Ionides},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.11184},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:53:51.037Z