Can one hear the shape of a population history?

Junhyong Kim, Elchanan Mossel, Miklós Z. Rácz, Nathan Ross

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

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 provide tight bounds on the amount of exact coalescence time data needed to recover the population size history of a single, panmictic population at a certain level of accuracy. In practice, coalescence times are estimated from sequence data and so our lower bounds should be taken as rather conservative.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)26-38
Number of pages13
JournalTheoretical Population Biology
Volume100
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 1 2015

Funding

We thank Anand Bhaskar, Luke Gandolfo, Jasmine Nirody, Sara Sheehan, and Yun Song for helpful discussions and relevant references. We also thank anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript which lead to several improvements. EM was supported by NSF grants DMS 1106999 and CCF 1320105 and by DOD ONR grant N000141110140 . MZR was supported by NSF grant DMS 1106999 and by DOD ONR grant N000141110140 . A portion of the work for this project was completed when NR was at University of California, Berkeley with support from NSF grants DMS-0704159 , DMS-0806118 , DMS-1106999 and ONR grant N00014-11-1-0140 .

Keywords

  • Coalescent
  • Estimation
  • Population size

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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