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.

22 pages, 7 figures; v2 is significantly revised from v1

References in corpus (2)

• Inferring the joint demographic history of multiple populations from multidimensional SNP frequency data
• Descartes' rule of signs and the identifiability of population demographic models from genomic variation data