genieR: An R package for inference of demographic history of phylogenies
Xiang, Fei;
Dearlove, Bethany;
Frost, Simon;
(2019)
genieR: An R package for inference of demographic history of phylogenies.
The Journal of Open Source Software, 4 (33).
p. 634.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00634
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genieR is an R package (R Core Team (2016)) for the inference of demographic history
from reconstructed molecular phylogenies (see Dearlove, Xiang, & Frost (2017) for one
application), modeled after the C++ package GENIE (Pybus & Rambaut, 2002). The
package processes phylogenetic trees in Newick format, in which taxa may be sampled
either at the same time (isochronous) or at different times (heterochronous); the latter are
particularly common in the analysis of pathogen sequence data. In addition to extracting
basic information from a particular phylogeny such as sampling and coalescent times,
genieR also fits a coalescent model (Kingman (1982)) under several demographic scenarios,
including constant population size, exponential growth, expansion growth, logistic growth,
with both continuous and piecewise variants. The fit of different models can be compared
using Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC) (Akaike, 1973) values. genieR uses C++ code
as an option for better computational performance, and models can be fit either using
maximum likelihood or Markov Chain Monte Carlo (Hastings, 1970). genieR can also
simulate phylogenies under different demographic models.