Related papers: Estimating effective population size changes from …
We establish convergence to the Kingman coalescent for a class of age-structured population models with time-constant population size. Time is discrete with unit called a year. Offspring numbers in a year may depend on mother's age.
Even in large systems, the effect of noise arising from when populations are initially small can persist to be measurable on the macroscale. A deterministic approximation to a stochastic model will fail to capture this effect, but it can be…
The model of population protocols provides a universal platform to study distributed processes driven by pairwise interactions of anonymous agents. While population protocols present an elegant and robust model for randomized distributed…
A case is made that researchers are interested in studying processes. Often the inferences they are interested in making are about the process and its associated population. On other occasions, a researcher may be interested in making an…
Widely used models in genetics include the Wright-Fisher diffusion and its moment dual, Kingman's coalescent. Each has a multilocus extension but under neither extension is the sampling distribution available in closed-form, and their…
Survey sampling plays an important role in the efficient allocation and management of resources. The essence of survey sampling lies in acquiring a sample of data points from a population and subsequently using this sample to estimate the…
Important objectives in cancer research are the prediction of a patient's risk based on molecular measurements such as gene expression data and the identification of new prognostic biomarkers (e.g. genes). In clinical practice, this is…
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…
We examine the problem of family size statistics (the number of individuals carrying the same surname, or the same DNA sequence) in a given size subsample of an exponentially growing population. We approach the problem from two directions.…
We introduce a population dynamics model, where individual genomes are represented by bit-strings. Selection is described by death probabilities which depend on these genomes, and new individuals continuously replace the ones that die,…
Mutations sometimes increase contagiousness for evolving pathogens. During an epidemic, scientists use viral genome data to infer a shared evolutionary history and connect this history to geographic spread. We propose a model that directly…
The prediction of phenotypic traits using high-density genomic data has many applications such as the selection of plants and animals of commercial interest; and it is expected to play an increasing role in medical diagnostics. Statistical…
The study of the dynamics of the size of a population via mathematical modelling is a problem of interest and widely studied. Traditionally, continuous deterministic methods based on differential equations have been used to deal with this…
Frequency dependent selection and demographic fluctuations play important roles in evolutionary and ecological processes. Under frequency dependent selection, the average fitness of the population may increase or decrease based on…
Evolutionary branching is analysed in a stochastic, individual-based population model under mutation and selection. In such models, the common assumption is that individual reproduction and life career are characterised by values of a…
Modern biological techniques enable very dense genetic sampling of unfolding evolutionary histories, and thus frequently sample some genotypes multiple times. This motivates strategies to incorporate genotype abundance information in…
The principle of maximum entropy provides a useful method for inferring statistical mechanics models from observations in correlated systems, and is widely used in a variety of fields where accurate data are available. While the assumptions…
Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…
We consider the effective sample size, based on Godambe information, for block likelihood inference which is an attractive and computationally feasible alternative to full likelihood inference for large correlated datasets. With reference…
We identify a new natural coalescent structure, which we call the seed-bank coalescent, that describes the gene genealogy of populations under the influence of a strong seed-bank effect, where "dormant forms" of individuals (such as seeds…