Asger Hobolth: Inferring population history from DNA sequences: Methods, models and challenges.

In this talk I plan to discuss basic methodology and recent results for inferring the history of population size in humans and other species. Variability in population size has traditionally been inferred from the site frequency spectrum,  but in the past few years methods based on complete genome sequences have been developed. The methods are based on the coalescent process with mutation and recombination. I also plan to talk about model checking. In particular I would like to draw attention to connections between mutation pattern summaries and corresponding methods from spatial statistics.