Can one hear the shape of a population history?

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

doi:10.1016/j.tpb.2014.12.002

Can one hear the shape of a population history?

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

Statistics and Data Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-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 language	English (US)
Pages (from-to)	26-38
Number of pages	13
Journal	Theoretical Population Biology
Volume	100
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tpb.2014.12.002
State	Published - 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

Access to Document

10.1016/j.tpb.2014.12.002

Cite this

@article{2ac151cda55d462b8c48d99d7483f6a7,

title = "Can one hear the shape of a population history?",

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.",

keywords = "Coalescent, Estimation, Population size",

author = "Junhyong Kim and Elchanan Mossel and R{\'a}cz, {Mikl{\'o}s Z.} and Nathan Ross",

note = "Funding Information: 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 . Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2014 Elsevier Inc.",

year = "2015",

month = mar,

day = "1",

doi = "10.1016/j.tpb.2014.12.002",

language = "English (US)",

volume = "100",

pages = "26--38",

journal = "Theoretical Population Biology",