data(human) loads in four R objects: stat.voight is a
data frame with 3 rows and 3 columns and contains the observed summary
statistics for three human populations, stat.3pops.sim is also a
data frame with 150,000 rows and 3 columns and contains the simulated
summary statistics, models is a vector of character strings of
length 150,000 and contains the model indices, par.italy.sim is a
data frame with 50,000 rows and 4 columns and contains the parameter
values that were used to simulate data under a population bottleneck
model. The corresponding summary statistics can be subsetted from the
stat.3pops.sim object as subset(stat.3pops.sim,
subset=models=="bott").data(human)par.italy.sim may then used
to estimate the ancestral population size of the European population
assuming a bottleneck model.
It is generally believed that African human populations are expanding,
while human populations from outside of Africa have gone through a
population bottleneck. Tajima's D statistic has been classically used
to detect changes in historical population size. A negative Tajima's D
signifies an excess of low frequency polymorphisms, indicating
population size expansion. While a positive Tajima's D indicates low
levels of both low and high frequency polymorphisms, thus a sign of a
population bottleneck. In constant size populations, Tajima's D is
expected to be zero. With the help of the human data one can reach these expected
conclusions for the three human population samples, in accordance with
the conclusions of Voight et al. (2005) (where the observed statistics
was taken from), but using ABC.
Hudson, R. R. (2002) Generating samples under a Wright-Fisher neutral model of genetic variation. Bioinformatics 18 337-338.
ppc