PopSim Satellite meeting

Building on the success of last year’s PopSim Symposium at CSHL, we are organising a follow-up workshop on Sunday, 6th October co-located with ProbGen. The goal of the meeting is to continue the theme of building standard simulation benchmarks and shared evaluation infrastructure, but to focus more narrowly on ARG/tree sequence inference. Significant progress has recently been made on this problem by the Relate and tsinfer methods, and there is an opportunity for the field to advance quickly if we can establish community standards for evaluation and interoperability.

Some key outcomes we'd like to achieve in this workshop are:

• Agreement on standards for evaluating inference methods, benchmark simulations to compare against, and a common code base for running such evaluations (building directly on the current PopSim work).
• Agreement on standards for interchange, in particular to enable modular inference methods (e.g., topology and branch length estimates) without loss of information between steps.
• Identify new applications (or new approaches to classical applications) in population genetics that are enabled by having trees, and agree on evaluation benchmarks.
• Have fun by spending a whole day talking about trees!

In terms of logistics, participants are expected to arrive in the conference centre on Saturday afternoon (dinner will be served at 8 pm), and there is an extra cost of 120 euro (food and one extra night included) in addition to the standard ProbGen registration fee (see details in the registration page).

The workshop is limited to 40 invited participants.