No Arabic abstract
We define the Sampled Moran Genealogy Process, a continuous-time Markov process on the space of genealogies with the demography of the classical Moran process, sampled through time. To do so, we begin by defining the Moran Genealogy Process using a novel representation. We then extend this process to include sampling through time. We derive exact conditional and marginal probability distributions for the sampled process under a stationarity assumption, and an exact expression for the likelihood of any sequence of genealogies it generates. This leads to some interesting observations pertinent to existing phylodynamic methods in the literature. Throughout, our proofs are original and make use of strictly forward-in-time calculations and are exact for all population sizes and sampling processes.
We study the evolution of the population genealogy in the classic neutral Moran Model of finite size and in discrete time. The stochastic transformations that shape a Moran population can be realized directly on its genealogy and give rise to a process with a state space consisting of the finite set of Yule trees of a certain size. We derive a number of properties of this process, and show that they are in agreement with existing results on the infinite-population limit of the Moran Model. Most importantly, this process admits time reversal, which gives rise to another tree-valued Markov Chain and allows for a thorough investigation of the Most Recent Common Ancestor process.
We reconsider the Moran model in continuous time with population size $N$, two allelic types, and selection. We introduce a new particle representation, which we call the labelled Moran model, and which has the same distribution of type frequencies as the original Moran model, provided the initial values are chosen appropriately. In the new model, individuals are labelled $1,2, dots, N$; neutral resampling events may take place between arbitrary labels, whereas selective events only occur in the direction of increasing labels. With the help of elementary methods only, we not only recover fixation probabilities, but also obtain detailed insight into the number and nature of the selective events that play a role in the fixation process forward in time.
We consider the Moran model in continuous time with two types, mutation, and selection. We concentrate on the ancestral line and its stationary type distribution. Building on work by Fearnhead (J. Appl. Prob. 39 (2002), 38-54) and Taylor (Electron. J. Probab. 12 (2007), 808-847), we characterise this distribution via the fixation probability of the offspring of all individuals of favourable type (regardless of the offsprings types). We concentrate on a finite population and stay with the resulting discrete setting all the way through. This way, we extend previous results and gain new insight into the underlying particle picture.
Inference with population genetic data usually treats the population pedigree as a nuisance parameter, the unobserved product of a past history of random mating. However, the history of genetic relationships in a given population is a fixed, unobserved object, and so an alternative approach is to treat this network of relationships as a complex object we wish to learn about, by observing how genomes have been noisily passed down through it. This paper explores this point of view, showing how to translate questions about population genetic data into calculations with a Poisson process of mutations on all ancestral genomes. This method is applied to give a robust interpretation to the $f_4$ statistic used to identify admixture, and to design a new statistic that measures covariances in mean times to most recent common ancestor between two pairs of sequences. The method more generally interprets population genetic statistics in terms of sums of specific functions over ancestral genomes, thereby providing concrete, broadly interpretable interpretations for these statistics. This provides a method for describing demographic history without simplified demographic models. More generally, it brings into focus the population pedigree, which is averaged over in model-based demographic inference.