Assessing differences between ancestral recombination graphs

Ancestral recombination graphs (ARGs) represent the history of portions of a genome with recombination. Attempts to infer ARGs have been hampered by the lack of an ARG comparison metric which could be used to measure how well inference succeeded. We propose a simple ARG comparison framework based on averaging standard tree comparison measures across sites. Using simulated data we show that this framework, instantiated with an appropriate tree comparison measure, can distinguish better from worse inferences of an ARG.

祖先重组图（Ancestral recombination graphs, ARGs）用于刻画携带重组事件的基因组片段的演化历史。此前针对ARG的推断工作，因缺乏可用于量化推断效果优劣的ARG比较度量标准而受阻。本文提出一种简洁的ARG比较框架，该框架通过对不同基因组位点上的标准树比较度量取平均构建而成。借助模拟数据的验证结果表明，采用适配的树比较度量实例化该框架后，能够有效区分ARG推断结果的优劣。