ABC & the eighth plague of Egypt [locusts in forests]

“If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians.” Exodus 10:3-6

Marie-Pierre Chapuis, Louis Raynal, and co-authors, mostly from Montpellier, published last year a paper on the evolutionary history of the African arid-adapted pest locust, Schistocerca gregaria, called the eighth plague of Egypt in the Bible. And a cause for a major food disaster in East Africa over the past months. The analysis was run with ABC-RF techniques. The paper was first reviewed in PCI Evolutionary Biology, with the following points:

The present-day distribution of extant species is the result of the interplay between their past population demography (e.g., expansion, contraction, isolation, and migration) and adaptation to the environment (…) The understanding of the key factors driving species evolution gives important insights into how the species may respond to changing conditions, which can be particularly relevant for the management of harmful species, such as agricultural pests.

Meaningful demographic inferences present major challenges. These include formulating evolutionary scenarios fitting species biology and the eco-geographical context and choosing informative molecular markers and accurate quantitative approaches to statistically compare multiple demographic scenarios and estimate the parameters of interest. A further issue comes with result interpretation. Accurately dating the inferred events is far from straightforward since reliable calibration points are necessary to translate the molecular estimates of the evolutionary time into absolute time units (i.e. years). This can be attempted in different ways (…) Nonetheless, most experimental systems rarely meet these conditions, hindering the comprehensive interpretation of results.

The contribution of Chapuis et al. addresses these issues to investigate the recent history of the (…) desert locust (…) Owing to their fast mutation rate microsatellite markers offer at least two advantages: i) suitability for analyzing recently diverged populations, and ii) direct estimate of the germline mutation rate in pedigree samples (…) The main aim of the study is to infer the history of divergence of the two subspecies of the desert locust, which have spatially disjoint distribution corresponding to the dry regions of North and West-South Africa. They first use paleo-vegetation maps to formulate hypotheses about changes in species range since the last glacial maximum. Based on them, they generate 12 divergence models. For the selection of the demographic model and parameter estimation, they apply the recently developed ABC-RF approach (…) Some methodological novelties are also introduced in this work, such as the computation of the error associated with the posterior parameter estimates under the best scenario (…) The best-supported model suggests a recent divergence event of the subspecies of S. gregaria (around 2.6 kya) and a reduction of populations size in one of the subspecies (S. g. flaviventris) that colonized the southern distribution area. As such, results did not support the hypothesis that the southward colonization was driven by the expansion of African dry environments associated with the last glacial maximum (…) The estimated time of divergence points at a much more recent origin for the two subspecies, during the late Holocene, in a period corresponding to fairly stable arid conditions similar to current ones. Although the authors cannot exclude that their microsatellite data bear limited information on older colonization events than the last one, they bring arguments in favour of alternative explanations. The hypothesis privileged does not involve climatic drivers, but the particularly efficient dispersal behaviour of the species, whose individuals are able to fly over long distances (up to thousands of kilometers) under favourable windy conditions (…)

There is a growing number of studies in phylogeography in arid regions in the Southern hemisphere, but the impact of past climate changes on the species distribution in this region remains understudied relative to the Northern hemisphere. The study presented by Chapuis et al. offers several important insights into demographic changes and the evolutionary history of an agriculturally important pest species in Africa, which could also mirror the history of other organisms in the continent (…)

Microsatellite markers have been offering a useful tool in population genetics and phylogeography for decades (…) This study reaffirms the usefulness of these classic molecular markers to estimate past demographic events, especially when species- and locus-specific microsatellite mutation features are available and a powerful inferential approach is adopted. Nonetheless, there are still hurdles to overcome, such as the limitations in scenario choice associated with the simulation software used (e.g. not allowing for continuous gene flow in this particular case), which calls for further improvement of simulation tools allowing for more flexible modeling of demographic events and mutation patterns. In sum, this work not only contributes to our understanding of the makeup of the African biodiversity but also offers a useful statistical framework, which can be applied to a wide array of species and molecular markers.

 

 

PCI Math Comp Biol gets live!

A new Peer Community (PCI) preprint and postprint server is about to get live, with Mathematical & Computational Biology as its core interest. Thanks to the efforts of Amaury Lambert, Céline Scornavacca, and Eric Tannier. Following the earlier PCI Evol Biol (and my aborted attempt to start a PCI Comput Stats…). Although the funding and the core team are mostly French, the target is obviously international and editors from all backgrounds and specialties are most welcome to join as authors and reviewers!

troubling trends in machine learning

This morning, in Coventry, while having an n-th cup of tea after a very early morning run (light comes early at this time of the year!), I spotted an intriguing title in the arXivals of the day, by Zachary Lipton and Jacob Steinhard. Addressing the academic shortcomings of machine learning papers. While I first thought little of the attempt to address poor scholarship in the machine learning literature, I read it with growing interest and, although I am pessimistic at the chances of inverting the trend, considering the relentless pace and massive production of the community, I consider the exercise worth conducting, if only to launch a debate on the excesses found in the literature.

“…desirable characteristics:  (i) provide intuition to aid the reader’s understanding, but clearly distinguish it from stronger conclusions supported by evidence; (ii) describe empirical investigations that consider and rule out alternative hypotheses; (iii) make clear the relationship between theoretical analysis and intuitive or empirical claims; and (iv) use language to empower the reader, choosing terminology to avoid misleading or unproven connotations, collisions with other definitions, or conflation with other related but distinct concepts”

The points made by the authors are (p.1)

1. Failure to distinguish between explanation and speculation
2. Failure to identify the sources of empirical gains
3. Mathiness
4. Misuse of language

Again, I had misgiving about point 3., but this is not an anti-maths argument, rather about the recourse to vaguely connected or oversold mathematical results as a way to support a method.

Most interestingly (and living dangerously!), the authors select specific papers to illustrate their point, picking from well-established authors and from their own papers, rather than from junior authors. And also include counter-examples of papers going the(ir) right way. Among the recommendations for emerging from the morass of poor scholarship papers, they suggest favouring critical writing and retrospective surveys (provided authors can be found for these!). And mention open reviews before I can mention these myself. One would think that published anonymous reviews are a step in the right direction, I would actually say that this should be the norm (plus or minus anonymity) for all journals or successors of journals (PCis coming strongly to mind). But requiring more work from the referees implies rewards for said referees, as done in some biology and hydrology journals I refereed for (and PCIs of course).

machine learning methods are useful for ABC [or my first PCI Evol Biol!]

While I am still working on setting a PCI [peer community in] Comput Stats, having secure sponsorship of some societies (ASA, KSS, RSS, SFdS, and hopefully ISBA), my coauthors Jean-Michel Marin and Louis Raynal submitted our paper ABC random forests for Bayesian parameter inference to PCI Evol Biol. And after a few months of review, including a revision accounting for the reviewers’ requests, our paper stood the test and the recommendation by Michael Blum and Dennis Prangle got published there. Great news, and hopefully helpful for our submission within the coming days!

and the travelling salesman is…

Here is another attempt at using StippleGen on… Alan Turing‘s picture. My reason for attempting a travelling salesman rendering of this well-known picture towards creating a logo for PCI Comput Stats, the peer community project I am working on this summer. With the help of the originators of PCI Evol Biol.