Quantitative diffusion approximation for the Neutral $r$-Alleles Wright-Fisher Model with Mutations

Abstract

We apply a Lindeberg principle under the Markov process setting to approximate the Wright-Fisher model with neutral $r$-alleles using a diffusion process, deriving an error rate based on a function class distance involving fourth-order bounded differentiable functions. This error rate consists of a linear combination of the maximum mutation rate and the reciprocal of the population size. Our result improves the error bound in the seminal work [PNAS,1977], where only the special case $r=2$ was studied.