Parameter Identifiability and Inference for Species Phylogenies Under the Coalescent

• Activity Number: 292
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: International Indian Statistical Association
• Author(s): Laura Kubatko* and Julia Chifman
• Companies: The Ohio State University and Wake Forest University
• Keywords: phylogenetic inference ; coalescent model ; species trees ; algebraic statistics

Abstract

The rapid increase in availability of DNA sequence data coupled with gains in computational power have led to the use of increasingly complex models for inferring the evolutionary relationships among collections of species. These models have largely made use of the coalescent to capture the within-population dynamics of the speciation process along a phylogenetic tree. Though at least a dozen inference methods/software packages have been developed in this setting in the last 10 years, there has been little attention given to identifiability of model parameters. We have previously established identifiability of the species tree topology using techniques from algebraic statistics. We now extend our methodology to consider the estimation of parameters along that tree, such as the effective population sizes and the times of the speciation events. We apply our methods to large-scale empirical data sets.