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Can one hear the shape of a population history?
Junhyong Kima b✉, Elchanan Mosselc d✉, Miklós Zoltán Ráczd e✉, Nathan Rossf g✉
- aUniversity of Pennsylvania, United States. Electronic address: junhyong@sas.upenn.edu
- bUniversity of Pennsylvania, United States
- cUniversity of California, Berkeley, United States. Electronic address: mossel@stat.berkeley.edu
- dUniversity of California, Berkeley, United States
- eUniversity of California, Berkeley, United States. Electronic address: racz@stat.berkeley.edu
- fUniversity of Melbourne, Australia. Electronic address: nathan.ross@unimelb.edu.au
- gUniversity of Melbourne, Australia
- ✉Corresponding author
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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.