Related papers: A conditional likelihood is required to estimate t…

A two-types, discrete-time population model with finite, constant size is constructed, allowing for a general form of frequency-dependent selection and skewed offspring distribution. Selection is defined based on the idea that individuals…

Likelihood-based methods are widely considered the best approaches for reconstructing ancestral states. Although much effort has been made to study properties of these methods, previous works often assume that both the tree topology and…

In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building up on a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global…

The tempo and mode of an adaptive process is strongly determined by the structure of the fitness landscape that underlies it. In order to be able to predict evolutionary outcomes (even on the short term), we must know more about the nature…

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,…

We propose a new estimation procedure of the conditional density for independent and identically distributed data. Our procedure aims at using the data to select a function among arbitrary (at most countable) collections of candidates. By…

The fitness landscape encodes the mapping of genotypes to fitness and provides a succinct representation of possible trajectories followed by an evolving population. Evolutionary accessibility is quantified by the existence of…

We show that each member of a broad class of Markovian population models induces a unique stochastic process on the space of genealogies. We construct this genealogy process and derive exact expressions for the likelihood of an observed…

Consider an advantageous allele that arises in a haploid population of size $N$ evolving in continuous time according to a skewed reproduction mechanism, which generates under neutrality genealogies lying in the domain of attraction of a…

When genetic algorithms are used to evolve decision trees, key tree quality parameters can be recursively computed and re-used across generations of partially similar decision trees. Simply storing instance indices at leaves is enough for…

The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…

Natural populations often show enhanced genetic drift consistent with a strong skew in their offspring number distribution. The skew arises because the variability of family sizes is either inherently strong or amplified by population…

Gene drive alleles bias their own inheritance to offspring. They can fix in a wild-type population in spite of a fitness cost, and even lead to the eradication of the target population if the fitness cost is high. However, this outcome may…

We demonstrate with a thought experiment that fitness-based population dynamical approaches to evolution are not able to make quantitative, falsifiable predictions about the long-term behavior of evolutionary systems. A key characteristic…

Phylodynamics seeks to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. One way to accomplish this task formulates an observed sequence data likelihood exploiting…

A simple weakly frequency dependent model for the dynamics of a population with a finite number of types is proposed, based upon an advantage of being rare. In the infinite population limit, this model gives rise to a non-smooth dynamical…

The key findings of classical population genetics are derived using a framework based on information theory using the entropies of the allele frequency distribution as a basis. The common results for drift, mutation, selection, and gene…

Many studies have analyzed how variability in reproductive success affects fitness. However, each study tends to focus on a particular problem, leaving unclear the overall structure of variability in populations. This fractured conceptual…

Likelihood methods for measuring statistical evidence obey the likelihood principle while maintaining bounded and well-controlled frequency properties. These methods lend themselves to sequential study designs because they measure the…

Deep generative models for anomaly detection in multivariate time-series are typically trained by maximizing data likelihood. However, likelihood in observation space measures marginal density rather than conformity to structured temporal…