GHIST 2025 will go live on June 23. It will include challenges in inferring demographic history and detecting selective sweeps. To be notified subscribe to our mailing list.
In population genomics, there are a dizzying array of potential data analysis approaches to infer population history, aspects of natural selection, or other evolutionary properties from data. Although methods developers try to evaluate their approaches, those evaluations can be unconsciously biased or may not reflect the experiences of real-world users. GHIST is an annual forum in which the community can test inference approaches in an unbiased fashion. Each year, the GHIST organizers release simulated population genomic data sets and host a competition to infer various aspects of the processes that generated those data. From the competitors’ solutions, the community will learn what approaches perform well or poorly in particular circumstances. Participating the competition is also great training for new students and researchers!
Getting Started
To help competitors get started, we created an hour-long introductory workshop. In the workshop, we introduce GHIST, use dadi-cli on a cloud instance to analyze the data from the first challenge, and submit our inference to the tournament. Join in!
GHIST 2024
The competition consisted of four demographic history inference challenges of escalating expected difficulty. For each challenge, we provided a VCF file with genomic data, and competitors submitted a simple text file with their inferences. We had roughly 60 registered participants, with 47 submissions to the simplest challenge and 12 to the most complex. The top competitors are co-authors on the publication describing the competition that is being drafted.
The Design Committee for the 2024 competiton was Katie Lotterhos, Andrés Moreno-Estrada, Peter Ralph, and Adam Siepel.
To see the 2024 competition, visit its page on Synapse. To hear results from the 2024 competition, watch my recent talk at ProbGen.
Frequently Asked Questions
The preferred pronunciation is /g/Ist.
No! You can use whatever approach you like. In fact, the greater the variety of approaches used, the more we'll learn.
Questions? Contact Ryan Gutenkunst at rgutenk@arizona.edu.
This competition is supported by NIH NIGMS grant R35 GM149235 to Ryan Gutenkunst.