Fastsimcoal2: Demographic inference under complex evolutionary scenarios

Abstract

Motivation: fastsimcoal2 extends fastsimcoal, a continuous time coalescent-based genetic simulation program, by enabling the estimation of demographic parameters under very complex scenarios from the site frequency spectrum under a maximum-likelihood framework. Results: Other improvements include multi-threading, handling of population inbreeding, extended input file syntax facilitating the description of complex demographic scenarios, and more efficient simulations of sparsely structured populations and of large chromosomes.