Can the Site-Frequency Spectrum Distinguish Exponential Population Growth from Multiple-Merger Coalescents?

@article{Eldon2015CanTS,
  title={Can the Site-Frequency Spectrum Distinguish Exponential Population Growth from Multiple-Merger Coalescents?},
  author={Bjarki Eldon and Matthias C. F. Birkner and Jochen Blath and Fabian Freund},
  journal={Genetics},
  year={2015},
  volume={199},
  pages={841 - 856}
}
The ability of the site-frequency spectrum (SFS) to reflect the particularities of gene genealogies exhibiting multiple mergers of ancestral lines as opposed to those obtained in the presence of population growth is our focus. An excess of singletons is a well-known characteristic of both population growth and multiple mergers. Other aspects of the SFS, in particular, the weight of the right tail, are, however, affected in specific ways by the two model classes. Using an approximate likelihood… 
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63 Citations

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Multi-locus data distinguishes between population growth and multiple merger coalescents
  • Jere Koskela
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    Statistical applications in genetics and molecular biology
  • 2018
Abstract We introduce a low dimensional function of the site frequency spectrum that is tailor-made for distinguishing coalescent models with multiple mergers from Kingman coalescent models with…
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This work derives a new formula for the expected SFS for general Λ- and Ξ-coalescents, which leads to an efficient algorithm and obtains general theoretical results for the identifiability of the Λ measure when ζ is a constant function, as well as for the identity of the function ζ under a fixed Ξ measure.
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