• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.37.1-37.8
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• 2019

Isolation-with-migration (IM) models have become popular for explaining population divergence in the presence of migrations. Bayesian methods are commonly used to estimate IM models, but they are limited to small data analysis or simple model inference. Recently three methods, IMa3, MIST, and AIM, resolved these limitations. Here, we describe the major problems addressed by these three software and compare differences among their inference methods, despite their use of the same standard likelihood function.

• Genomics & Informatics
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.27.1-27.7
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• 2023

Recombination events complicate the evolutionary history of populations and species and have a significant impact on the inference of isolation-with-migration (IM) models. However, several existing methods have been developed, assuming no recombination within a locus and free recombination between loci. In this study, we investigated the effect of recombination on the estimation of IM models using genomic data. We conducted a simulation study to evaluate the consistency of the parameter estimators with up to 1,000 loci and analyze true gene trees to examine the sources of errors in estimating the IM model parameters. The results showed that the presence of recombination led to biased estimates of the IM model parameters, with population sizes being more overestimated and migration rates being more underestimated as the number of loci increased. The magnitude of the biases tended to increase with the recombination rates when using 100 or more loci. On the other hand, the estimation of splitting times remained consistent as the number of loci increased. In the absence of recombination, the estimators of the IM model parameters remained consistent.

• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.385-395
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• 2020

We present a new maximum likelihood approach to estimate demographic history using genomic data sampled from two populations. A demographic model such as an isolation-with-migration (IM) model explains the genetic divergence of two populations split away from their common ancestral population. The standard probability model for an IM model contains a latent variable called genealogy that represents gene-specific evolutionary paths and links the genetic data to the IM model. Under an IM model, a genealogy consists of two kinds of evolutionary paths of genetic data: vertical inheritance paths (coalescent events) through generations and horizontal paths (migration events) between populations. The computational complexity of the IM model inference is one of the major limitations to analyze genomic data. We propose a fast maximum likelihood approach to estimate IM models from genomic data. The first step analyzes genomic data and maximizes the likelihood of a coalescent tree that contains vertical paths of genealogy. The second step analyzes the estimated coalescent trees and finds the parameter values of an IM model, which maximizes the distribution of the coalescent trees after taking account of possible migration events. We evaluate the performance of the new method by analyses of simulated data and genomic data from two subspecies of common chimpanzees in Africa.

• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.347-355
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• 2020

An Isolation-with-Migration (IM) model is used to estimate extant population sizes, the splitting time of populations split away from their common ancestral populations, and migration rates between the extant populations. An evolutionary model such as IM models is estimated by analyzing DNA sequences sampled from the extant populations in the model. When a true model includes an unsampled 'ghost' population without data, the unsampled population is often ignored from the evolutionary model to infer. In this paper, we conduct a simulation study to investigate the effect of an unsampled population on the estimation of the size of the sampled population. When there exists an unsampled population that shares migrations with the sampled population, the size estimation of the sampled population was biased. However, the size estimation was improved if an evolutionary model, including the unsampled population, was estimated.