title: Can one hear the shape of a population history?
abstract: Reconstructing past population size from present day genetic data is a major goal of population genetics. Recent empirical studies infer population size history using coalescent-based models applied to a small number of individuals. Here we provide tight bounds on the amount of exact coalescence time data needed to recover the population size history of a single, panmictic population at a certain level of accuracy. In practice, coalescence times are estimated from sequence data and so our lower bounds should be taken as rather conservative.
authors.affiliation: University of Pennsylvania, United States. Electronic address: junhyong@sas.upenn.edu.
authors.forename: Junhyong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, United States. Electronic address: mossel@stat.berkeley.edu.
authors.forename: Elchanan
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Mossel
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, United States. Electronic address: racz@stat.berkeley.edu.
authors.forename: Miklós Z
authors.initials: MZ
authors.lastname: Rácz
authors.affiliation: University of Melbourne, Australia. Electronic address: nathan.ross@unimelb.edu.au.
authors.forename: Nathan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ross
keywords: Coalescent; Estimation; Population size