Back

Stairway Plot v3: Nonparametric Demographic Inference from the Site Frequency Spectrum at Biobank Scale

Liu, X.

2026-09-22 genomics
10.64898/2026.09.16.751895 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Inferring the history of effective population size (Ne) from genomic data is fundamental to population genetics, but model-flexible methods have not kept pace with biobank-scale samples. We present Stairway Plot v3, which infers a nonparametric Ne (t) trajectory with bootstrap confidence intervals directly from the site frequency spectrum (SFS). By recasting the optimization as a convex problem and combining inferences across multiple sub-sampled projections, the method scales to 100,000 haploid sequences on commodity CPU hardware without a GPU. Larger samples sharpen the resolution of recent demography, and we apply the method to five human populations including 54,302 Japanese individuals, to our knowledge the largest sample used for nonparametric SFS-based Ne (t) inference.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.