Department of Mathematics Special Colloquium
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This special colloquium will host a faculty candidate.
Speaker: Alexey Miroshnikov, Assistant Adjunct Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of California Los Angeles
Title: Inference of demographic histories for populations of variable size.
Abstract: Studying the demographic histories of humans or other species and understanding their effects on contemporary genetic variability is one of the central tasks of population genetics.
The genealogical relationship of a sample of several individuals is commonly modeled by the ancestral recombination graph (ARG). The ARG has a very complex structure and using it for inference is computationally prohibitive.
In this talk I will present novel Hidden Markov Models used to approximate the ARG and an effective computational methodology for inference of demographic histories based on these models.