Related papers: Population Structure and Cryptic Relatedness in Ge…
The identification of key populations shaping the structure and connectivity of metapopulation systems is a major challenge in population ecology. The use of molecular markers in the theoretical framework of population genetics has allowed…
Population genetic studies have found evidence for dramatic population growth in recent human history. It is unclear how this recent population growth, combined with the effects of negative natural selection, has affected patterns of…
Many aspects of the historical relationships between populations in a species are reflected in genetic data. Inferring these relationships from genetic data, however, remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present a statistical model…
Genome-wide association study (GWAS) tests single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers across the genome to localize the underlying causal variant of a trait. Because causal variants are seldom observed directly, a surrogate model based on…
Community identification of network components enables us to understand the mesoscale clustering structure of networks. A number of algorithms have been developed to determine the most likely community structures in networks. Such a…
The coalescent is a stochastic process representing ancestral lineages in a population undergoing neutral genetic drift. Originally defined for a well-mixed population, the coalescent has been adapted in various ways to accommodate spatial,…
Many questions that we have about the history and dynamics of organisms have a geographical component: How many are there, and where do they live? How do they move and interbreed across the landscape? How were they moving a thousand years…
Kin selection theory is a kind of causal analysis. The initial form of kin selection ascribed cause to costs, benefits, and genetic relatedness. The theory then slowly developed a deeper and more sophisticated approach to partitioning the…
Population protocols [Angluin et al., PODC, 2004] are a model of distributed computation in which indistinguishable, finite-state agents interact in pairs to decide if their initial configuration, i.e., the initial number of agents in each…
Human aging is a process controlled by both genetics and environment. Many studies have been conducted to identify a subset of genes related to aging from the human genome. Biologists implicitly categorize age-related genes into genes that…
This paper derives a population sizing relationship for genetic programming (GP). Following the population-sizing derivation for genetic algorithms in Goldberg, Deb, and Clark (1992), it considers building block decision making as a key…
Mapping human genetic variation is fundamentally interesting in fields such as anthropology and forensic inference. At the same time patterns of genetic diversity confound efforts to determine the genetic basis of complex disease. Due to…
The ongoing explosion of genome sequence data is transforming how we reconstruct and understand the histories of biological systems. Across biological scales, from individual cells to populations and species, trees-based models provide a…
Mounting evidence suggests that natural populations can harbor extensive fitness diversity with numerous genomic loci under selection. It is also known that genealogical trees for populations under selection are quantifiably different from…
Mobile call networks have been widely used to investigate communication patterns and the network of interactions of humans at the societal scale. Yet, more detailed analysis is often hindered by having no information about the nature of the…
We study the effect of biological confounders on the model selection problem between Kingman coalescents with population growth, and Xi-coalescents involving simultaneous multiple mergers. We use a low dimensional, computationally tractable…
Motivated by the important problem of detecting association between genetic markers and binary traits in genome-wide association studies, we present a novel Bayesian model that establishes a hierarchy between markers and genes by defining…
Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…
We analyse the statistical properties of genealogical trees in a neutral model of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. By reconstructing the genealogy of an individual from the population evolution,…
Sweepstakes reproduction may be generated by chance matching of reproduction with favorable environmental conditions. Gene genealogies generated by sweepstakes reproduction are in the domain of attraction of multiple-merger coalescents…