popabc

Introduction PopABC is a computer package to estimate historical demographic parameters of closely related species/populations (e.g. population size, migration rate, mutation rate, recombination rate, splitting events) within a Isolation with migration model. The software performs coalescent simulation in the framework of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC, Beaumont et al, 2002). PopABC can also be used to perform Bayesian model choice to discriminate between different demographic scenarios. The program can be used either for research or for education and teaching purposes. MODELS Statistical model Although there are a number of different flavours of ABC, PopABC follows the standard rejection/regression approach, which has been frequently tested against full-likelihood alternatives. The base algorithm (Pritchard et al, 1999) can be summarized as: 1. Sample parameters, P, from the priors: P_i ~