An efficient coalescent epoch model for Bayesian phylogenetic inference

Abstract

We present a two headed approach called Bayesian Integrated Coalescent Epoch PlotS (BICEPS) for efficient inference of coalescent epoch models. Firstly, we integrate out population size parameters and secondly we introduce a set of more powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) proposals for flexing and stretching trees. Even though population sizes are integrated out and not explicitly sampled through MCMC, we are still able to generate samples from the population size posteriors, which allows demographic reconstruction through time. Altogether, BICEPS can be considered a more muscular version of the popular Bayesian skyline model. We demonstrate its power and correctness by a well calibrated simulation study. Furthermore, we demonstrate with an application to COVID-19 genomic data that some analyses that have trouble converging with the traditional Bayesian skyline prior and standard MCMC proposals can do well with the BICEPS approach. BICEPS is available as open source package for BEAST 2 under GPL license and has a user friendly graphical user interface.