PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Fabian Freund
AU  - Arno Siri-jégousse
TI  - Distinguishing coalescent models - which statistics matter most?
AID  - 10.1101/679498
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 679498
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/22/679498.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/22/679498.full
AB  - Modelling genetic diversity needs an underlying genealogy model. To choose a fitting model based on genetic data, one can perform model selection between classes of genealogical trees, e.g. Kingman’s co-alescent with exponential growth or multiple merger coalescents. Such selection can be based on many different statistics measuring genetic diversity. We use a random forest based Approximate Bayesian Computation to disentangle the effects of different statistics on distinguishing between various classes of genealogy models. For the specific question of inferring whether genealogies feature multiple mergers, we introduce a new statistic, the observable minimal clade size, which corresponds to the minimal allele count of non-private mutations in an individual.