Related papers: Genetic structure of Sino-Tibetan populations reve…
Challenging optimisation problems are abundant in all areas of science. Since the 1950s, scientists have developed ever-diversifying families of black box optimisation algorithms designed to address any optimisation problem, requiring only…
We study a general setting of neutral evolution in which the population is of finite, constant size and can have spatial structure. Mutation leads to different genetic types ("traits"), which can be discrete or continuous. Under minimal…
There is an urgent and well-recognized need to extend genetic studies to diverse populations, but several obstacles continue to be prohibitive, including (but not limited to) the difficulty of recruiting individuals from diverse populations…
This paper uses a novel data-driven probabilistic approach to address the century-old Inner-Outer hypothesis of Indo-Aryan. I develop a Bayesian hierarchical mixed-membership model to assess the validity of this hypothesis using a large…
The study of genetic variants can help find correlating population groups to identify cohorts that are predisposed to common diseases and explain differences in disease susceptibility and how patients react to drugs. Machine learning…
Estimating the phylogeny of the genus Homo is entering a new phase of vastly improved data and methodology. There is increasing evidence of 6 to 10 competing species/lineages at any point in the last half million years, making the…
For many traits, including susceptibility to common diseases in humans, causal loci uncovered by genetic mapping studies explain only a minority of the heritable contribution to trait variation. Multiple explanations for this "missing…
In an extant population, how much information do extant individuals provide on the pedigree of their ancestors? Recent work by Kim, Mossel, Ramnarayan and Turner (2020) studied this question under a number of simplifying assumptions,…
The detection of molecular signatures of selection is one of the major concerns of modern population genetics. A widely used strategy in this context is to compare samples from several populations, and to look for genomic regions with…
The domestication and development of cattle has considerably impacted human societies, but the histories of cattle breeds have been poorly understood especially for African, Asian, and American breeds. Using genotypes from 43,043 autosomal…
Many biological characteristics of evolutionary interest are not scalar variables but continuous functions. Given a dataset of function-valued traits generated by evolution, we develop a practical statistical approach to infer ancestral…
We updated the agent based Monte Carlo code HERITAGE that simulates human evolution within restrictive environments such as interstellar, sub-light speed spacecraft in order to include the effects of population genetics. We incorporated a…
Recruitment dynamics, or the distribution of the number of offspring among individuals, is central for understanding ecology and evolution. Sweepstakes reproduction (heavy right-tailed offspring number distribution) is central for…
The accuracy of prosodic structure prediction is crucial to the naturalness of synthesized speech in Mandarin text-to-speech system, but now is limited by widely-used sequence-to-sequence framework and error accumulation from previous word…
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…
Recent improvements in high-throughput genotyping and sequencing technologies have afforded the collection of massive, genome-wide datasets of DNA information from hundreds of thousands of individuals. These datasets, in turn, provide…
We present a method to discover differences between populations with respect to the spatial coherence of their oriented white matter microstructure in arbitrarily shaped white matter regions. This method is applied to diffusion MRI scans of…
Tonogenesis-the historical process by which segmental contrasts evolve into lexical tone-has traditionally been studied through comparative reconstruction and acoustic phonetics. We introduce a computational approach that quantifies the…
Mitochondrial DNA from fourteen archaeological samples at the Ural State University in Yekaterinburg, Russia was extracted to test the feasibility of ancient DNA work on their collection. These samples come from a number of sites that fall…
We provide the largest compiled publicly available dictionaries of first, middle, and last names for the purpose of imputing race and ethnicity using, for example, Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG). The dictionaries are based on…