Related papers: Estimating the Strength of Selective Sweeps from D…
Range expansion and range shifts are crucial population responses to climate change. Genetic consequences are not well understood but are clearly coupled to ecological dynamics that, in turn, are driven by shifting climate conditions. We…
Many policies hinge on a continuous variable exceeding a threshold, prompting strategic behavior by agents to stay on the favorable side. This creates density discontinuities at cutoffs, evident in contexts like taxable income, corporate…
Recent studies have shown that human populations have experienced a complex demographic history, including a recent epoch of rapid population growth that led to an excess in the proportion of rare genetic variants in humans today. This…
Feature selection is a critical step in the analysis of high-dimensional data, where the number of features often vastly exceeds the number of samples. Effective feature selection not only improves model performance and interpretability but…
Fish harvesting often targets larger individuals, which can be sex-specific due to size dimorphism or differences in behaviors like migration and spawning. Sex-selective harvesting can have dire consequences in the long run, potentially…
In statistical genetics an important task involves building predictive models for the genotype-phenotype relationships and thus attribute a proportion of the total phenotypic variance to the variation in genotypes. Numerous models have been…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…
We study distributed optimization algorithms for minimizing the average of \emph{heterogeneous} functions distributed across several machines with a focus on communication efficiency. In such settings, naively using the classical stochastic…
Inferring concerted changes among biological traits along an evolutionary history remains an important yet challenging problem. Besides adjusting for spurious correlation induced from the shared history, the task also requires sufficient…
The Horvitz-Thompson (HT) estimator is widely used in survey sampling. However, the variance of the HT estimator becomes large when the inclusion probabilities are highly heterogeneous. To overcome this shortcoming, in this paper, a…
We present a new adaptive algorithm for learning discrete distributions under distribution drift. In this setting, we observe a sequence of independent samples from a discrete distribution that is changing over time, and the goal is to…
Understanding patterns of selectively neutral genetic variation is essential in order to model deviations from neutrality, caused for example by different forms of selection. Best understood is neutral genetic variation at a single locus,…
Numerous traits under migration-selection balance are shown to exhibit complex patterns of genetic architecture with large variance in effect sizes. However, the conditions under which such genetic architectures are stable have yet to be…
We consider large-scale studies in which it is of interest to test a very large number of hypotheses, and then to estimate the effect sizes corresponding to the rejected hypotheses. For instance, this setting arises in the analysis of gene…
We consider an asexual population under strong selection-weak mutation conditions evolving on rugged fitness landscapes with many local fitness peaks. Unlike the previous studies in which the initial fitness of the population is assumed to…
Biochemical and regulatory interactions central to biological networks are expected to cause extensive genetic interactions or epistasis affecting the heritability of complex traits and the distribution of genotypes in populations. However,…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Mutational robustness quantifies the effect of random mutations on fitness. When mutational robustness is high, most mutations do not change fitness or have only a minor effect on it. From the point of view of fitness landscapes, robust…
In the human genomes, recombination frequency between homologous chromosomes during meiosis is highly correlated with their physical length while it differs significantly when their coding density is considered. Furthermore, it has been…
Genomic regions (or loci) displaying outstanding correlation with some environmental variables are likely to be under selection and this is the rationale of recent methods of identifying selected loci and retrieving functional information…