ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Fundamental limits on the accuracy of demographic inference based on the sample frequency spectrum.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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49 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Not Just Ne Ne-More: New Applications for SMC from Ecology to Phylogenies.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Review
- Inference of complex demographic history using composite likelihood based on whole-genome genealogies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Accelerated Bayesian inference of population size history from recombining sequence data.Nature genetics · 2025Article
- Postglacial Echoes: Parasite Genomics Uncover Environmental Changes in Postglacial European Lakes.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Bayesian StairwayPlot for Inferring Single Population Demographic Histories From Site Frequency Spectra.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Inference of Gene Flow between Species from Genomic Data When the Mode, Direction, and Lineages are Misspecified.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Bayesian phylodynamic inference of population dynamics with dormancy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Pleistocene island connectivity did not enhance dispersal or impact population size change in Galápagos geckos.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
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- Demographic History, Genetic Load, and the Efficacy of Selection in the Globally Invasive Mosquito Aedes aegypti.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans.Nature genetics · 2025Article
- Reading tree leaves: inferring speciation anfd extinction processes using phylogenies.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Bayesian phylodynamic inference of population dynamics with dormancy.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A previously reported bottleneck in human ancestry 900 kya is likely a statistical artifact.Genetics · 2025Article
- Unraveling the genomic landscape ofEcology and evolution · 2024Article
- Conditional frequency spectra as a tool for studying selection on complex traits in biobanks.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Computationally Efficient Demographic History Inference from Allele Frequencies with Supervised Machine Learning.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Computationally efficient demographic history inference from allele frequencies with supervised machine learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Haplotype-based inference of recent effective population size in modern and ancient DNA samples.Nature communications · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The sample frequency spectrum (SFS) of DNA sequences from a collection of individuals is a summary statistic that is commonly used for parametric inference in population genetics. Despite the popularity of SFS-based inference methods, little is currently known about the information theoretic limit on the estimation accuracy as a function of sample size. Here, we show that using the SFS to estimate the size history of a population has a minimax error of at least O(1/log s), where s is the number of independent segregating sites used in the analysis. This rate is exponentially worse than known convergence rates for many classical estimation problems in statistics. Another surprising aspect of our theoretical bound is that it does not depend on the dimension of the SFS, which is related to the number of sampled individuals. This means that, for a fixed number s of segregating sites considered, using more individuals does not help to reduce the minimax error bound. Our result pertains to populations that have experienced a bottleneck, and we argue that it can be expected to apply to many populations in nature.
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