Comparative Performance of Popular Methods for Hybrid Detection using Genomic Data

Interspecific hybridization is an important evolutionary phenomenon that generates genetic variability in a population and fosters species diversity in nature. The availability of large genome scale datasets has revolutionized hybridization studies to shift from the examination of the presence or absence of hybrids in nature to the investigation of the genomic constitution of hybrids and their genome-specific evolutionary dynamics. Although a handful of methods have been proposed in an attempt to identify hybrids, accurate detection of hybridization from genomic data remains a challenging task. The available methods can be classified broadly as site pattern frequency based and population genetic clustering approaches, though the performance of the two classes of methods under different hybridization scenarios has not been extensively examined. Here, we use simulated data to comparatively evaluate the performance of four tools that are commonly used to infer hybridization events: the sit...