PipeMaster: inferring population divergence and demographic history with approximate Bayesian computation and supervised machine-learning in R

Understanding population divergence involves testing diversification scenarios and estimating historical parameters, such as divergence time, population size and migration rate. There is, however, an immense space of possible highly parameterized scenarios that are difsficult or impossible to solve analytically. To overcome this problem researchers have used alternative simulation-based approaches, such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) and supervised machine learning (SML), to approximate posterior probabilities of hypotheses. In this study we demonstrate the utility of our newly developed R-package to simulate summary statistics to perform ABC and SML inferences. We compare the power of both ABC and SML methods and the influence of the number of loci in the accuracy of inferences; and we show three empirical examples: (i) the Muller’s termite frog genomic data from Southamerica; (ii) the cottonmouth and (iii) and the copperhead snakes sanger data from Northamerica. We found that SML is more efficient than ABC. It is generally more accurate and needs fewer simulations to perform an inference. We found support for a divergence model without migration, with a recent bottleneck for one of the populations of the southamerican frog. For the cottonmouth we found support for divergence with migration and recent expansion and for the copperhead we found support for a model of divergence with migration and recent bottleneck. Interestingly, by using an SML method it was possible to achieve high accuracy in model selection even when several models were compared in a single inference. We also found a higher accuracy when inferring parameters with SML.