Congratulations to Stéphane Guindon for his paper entitled “Accounting for spatial sampling patterns in Bayesian phylogeography” published in PNAS.
Phylogeography is the discipline that focuses on the analysis of geo-referenced genetic sequences. The locations sampled, i.e. the places where genetic material is collected, are sometimes chosen according to logistical constraints (some locations are easier to access than others, some countries generate more data than others, etc.).
In other cases, sampling is done in proportion to the underlying population density, and sometimes even exhaustively. Our work shows that ignoring these modeling elements leads to overestimating the precision of estimates of crucial parameters in phylogeography. We also describe here a new stochastic model and an algorithm for Bayesian inference following this model, which allows to infer parameters in an efficient way.
For more information: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43588-022-00194-4
