Population divergence time estimation using individual lineage label switching
Divergence time estimation from multilocus genetic data has become common in population genetics and phylogenetics. We present a new Bayes inference method that treats the divergence time as a random variable. The divergence time is calculated from an assembly of splitting events on individual lineages in a genealogy. The waiting time for such a splitting event is drawn from a hazard function of the truncated normal distribution. This allows easy integration into the standard coalescence framework used in programs such as MIGRATE. We explore the accuracy of the new inference method with simulated population splittings over a wide range of divergence time values and with a dataset of the Zika virus; the geographic analyses of the expansion of the pathogen follows a trajectory from Africa to Asia to America, corroborating analyses based only on the dates of incidences. Evaluations of simple divergence models show high accuracy, whereas the accuracy of the results of isolation with migration (IM) models depend on the magnitude of the immigration rate and potentially on the number of samples. High immigration rates lead to a time of the most recent common ancestor of the sample that predates the divergence time, thus loses any potential signal of the divergence event in the sample data. This reduced accuracy with high immigration rates is problematic for all IM methods, including ours.