Related papers: An empirical approach to demographic inference wit…
There are many instances in genetics in which we wish to determine whether two candidate populations are distinguishable on the basis of their genetic structure. Examples include populations which are geographically separated, case--control…
We describe a continuous-time modelling framework for biological population dynamics that accounts for demographic noise. In the spirit of the methodology used by statistical physicists, transitions between the states of the system are…
We consider a general branching population where the lifetimes of individuals are i.i.d.\ with arbitrary distribution and where each individual gives birth to new individuals at Poisson times independently from each other. In addition, we…
Given samples from a distribution, how many new elements should we expect to find if we continue sampling this distribution? This is an important and actively studied problem, with many applications ranging from unseen species estimation to…
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…
Multivariate compositional count data arise in many applications including ecology, microbiology, genetics, and paleoclimate. A frequent question in the analysis of multivariate compositional count data is what values of a covariate(s) give…
Probability modelling for DNA sequence evolution is well established and provides a rich framework for understanding genetic variation between samples of individuals from one or more populations. We show that both classical and more recent…
Consider a supercritical birth and death process where the children acquire mutations. We study the mutation rates along the ancestral lineages in a sample of size $n$ from the population at time $T$. The mutation rate is time-inhomogenous…
Estimating the size of an elusive target population is of prominent interest in many areas in the life and social sciences. Our aim is to provide an efficient and workable method to estimate the unknown population size, given the frequency…
In using observed data to make inferences about a population quantity, it is commonly assumed that the sampling distribution from which the data were drawn belongs to a given parametric family of distributions, or at least, a given finite…
The language commonly used in human genetics can inadvertently pose problems for multiple reasons. Terms like "ancestry", "ethnicity", and other ways of grouping people can have complex, often poorly understood, or multiple meanings within…
When an advantageous mutation occurs in a population, the favorable allele may spread to the entire population in a short time, an event known as a selective sweep. As a result, when we sample $n$ individuals from a population and trace…
This paper describes a methodology for analyzing the evolutionary dynamics of genetic programming (GP) using genealogical information, diversity measures and information about the fitness variation from parent to offspring. We introduce a…
Populations of interest are often hidden from data for a variety of reasons, though their magnitude remains important in determining resource allocation and appropriate policy. One popular approach to population size estimation, the…
The advent of accessible ancient DNA technology now allows the direct ascertainment of allele frequencies in ancestral populations, thereby enabling the use of allele frequency time series to detect and estimate natural selection. Such…
In this paper we study the iterated birth process of which we examine the first-passage time distributions and the hitting probabilities. Furthermore, linear birth processes, linear and sublinear death processes at Poisson times are…
Observed differences in mean phenotypic values across human groups have attracted renewed interest with the rise of large-scale genomic studies and polygenic risk prediction. However, the genetic basis of these differences is far more…
We propose a Bayesian nonparametric model to infer population admixture, extending the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process to allow for correlation between loci due to Linkage Disequilibrium. Given multilocus genotype data from a sample of…
The membership inference problem for publicly released statistics from a private dataset is well-studied. When developing and formally analyzing attack strategies, however, the focus has been on attacks that model the population using only…
We address the problem of the joint statistical inference of phylogenetic trees and multiple sequence alignments from unaligned molecular sequences. This problem is generally formulated in terms of string-valued evolutionary processes along…