"A particle filtering approach to the multispecies coalescent"
Paul Lewis
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
University of Connecticut
Wednesday, Apr 9, 2025
Abstract:
The multispecies coalescent (MSC) model applies coalescent theory to gene evolution within and among reproductively isolated populations ("species") to estimate a species tree in the face of potential gene tree conflict resulting from deep coalescence. We are exploring the use of particle filtering (PF) to sample from the MSC posterior distribution, providing a fully Bayesian and easily parallelized alternative to traditional Metropolis-Hastings MCMC approaches. The method we propose samples first from the joint posterior distribution of gene and species trees, then samples species trees conditional on gene trees sampled previously, employing PF for both. Analyses of simulated and empirical datasets yield results comparable to state-of-the-art Bayesian MCMC approaches but at a fraction of the computational cost.
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