Related papers: Exact Limits of Inference in Coalescent Models
Reconstructing past population size from present day genetic data is a major goal of population genetics. Recent empirical studies infer population size history using coalescent-based models applied to a small number of individuals. Here we…
Coalescent theory combined with statistical modeling allows us to estimate effective population size fluctuations from molecular sequences of individuals sampled from a population of interest. When sequences are sampled serially through…
Reconstruction of population histories is a central problem in population genetics. Existing coalescent-based methods, like the seminal work of Li and Durbin (Nature, 2011), attempt to solve this problem using sequence data but have no…
Many population genetic models have been developed for the purpose of inferring population size and growth rates from random samples of genetic data. We examine two popular approaches to this problem, the coalescent and the…
Studying how diverse human populations are related is of historical and anthropological interest, in addition to providing a realistic null model for testing for signatures of natural selection or disease associations. Furthermore,…
Samples of multiple complete genome sequences contain vast amounts of information about the evolutionary history of populations, much of it in the associations among polymorphisms at different loci. Current methods that take advantage of…
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…
Effective population size characterizes the genetic variability in a population and is a parameter of paramount importance in population genetics. Kingman's coalescent process enables inference of past population dynamics directly from…
Changes in population size influence genetic diversity of the population and, as a result, leave a signature of these changes in individual genomes in the population. We are interested in the inverse problem of reconstructing past…
The rapid development of sequencing technologies represents new opportunities for population genetics research. It is expected that genomic data will increase our ability to reconstruct the history of populations. While this increase in…
Study sample sizes in human genetics are growing rapidly, and in due course it will become routine to analyze samples with hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals. In addition to posing computational challenges, such large…
Identifiability of evolutionary tree models has been a recent topic of discussion and some models have been shown to be non-identifiable. A coalescent-based rooted population tree model, originally proposed by Nielsen et al. 1998 [2], has…
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…
Variation in a sample of molecular sequence data informs about the past evolutionary history of the sample's population. Traditionally, Bayesian modeling coupled with the standard coalescent, is used to infer the sample's bifurcating…
Genetic data are often used to infer demographic history and changes or detect genes under selection. Inferential methods are commonly based on models making various strong assumptions: demography and population structures are supposed…
Many biological studies involve inferring the evolutionary history of a sample of individuals from a large population and interpreting the reconstructed tree. Such an ascertained tree typically represents only a small part of a…
We analyse sequential Markov coalescent algorithms for populations with demographic structure: for a bottleneck model, a population-divergence model, and for a two-island model with migration. The sequential Markov coalescent method is an…
Phylodynamics focuses on the problem of reconstructing past population size dynamics from current genetic samples taken from the population of interest. This technique has been extensively used in many areas of biology, but is particularly…
The coalescent revolutionised theoretical population genetics, simplifying, or making possible for the first time, many analyses, proofs, and derivations, and offering crucial insights about the way in which the structure of data in samples…
Human populations have a complex history of introgression and of changing population size. Human genetic variation has been affected by both these processes, so that inference of past population size depends upon the pattern of gene flow…