Sequence-level population simulations over large genomic regions

Abstract

Simulation is an invaluable tool for investigating the effects of various population genetics modeling assumptions on resulting patterns of genetic diversity, and for assessing the performance of statistical techniques, for example those designed to detect and measure the genomic effects of selection. It is also used to investigate the effectiveness of various design options for genetic association studies. Backward-intime simulation methods are computationally efficient and have become widely used since their introduction in the 1980s. The forward-in-time approach has substantial advantages in terms of accuracy and modeling flexibility, but at greater computational cost. We have developed f..