Online Program Home
My Program

Abstract Details

Activity Number: 403 - SPAAC Poster Competition
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Tuesday, July 30, 2019 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
Sponsor: Section on Statistics in Genomics and Genetics
Abstract #305214
Title: Estimation of Speciation Times Under the Multispecies Coalescent
Author(s): Jing Peng* and Laura Kubatko and David Swofford
Companies: The Ohio State University and The Ohio State University and Duke University
Keywords: Branch length; Pseudoliklihood; Computation cost; Species tree; JC69; Statistical consistent
Abstract:

At the species level, phylogenetic trees are essential to understanding the evolution process and relationships among species, and thus to the interpretation of biological information in a collection of DNA sequence data. As the typical attributes of a species tree, branch lengths,or speciation times, can help to date the formation of the species. Here we derive an estimator for branch lengths under the multi-species coalescent model and the Jukes-Cantor model, assuming the molecular clock. Our proposed estimator is distinct from the existing estimators, in that it uses pseudolikelihood to obtain computationally efficient estimators in a model-based framework. The method incorporates all of the variability in the data without losing computational efficiency. We show that this estimator is statistically consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. We find that use of the nonparametric bootstrap provides a more accurate estimate of the variance of the estimates than theoretical asymptotic variance. The performance and computational cost associated with our method of speciation time estimation is assessed using simulated datasets and a genome-scale dataset for gibbons.


Authors who are presenting talks have a * after their name.

Back to the full JSM 2019 program