ipcoal: an interactive Python package for simulating and analyzing genealogies and sequences on a species tree or network

Abstract

ipcoal is a free and open source Python package for simulating and analyzing genealogies and sequences. It automates the task of describing complex demographic models (e.g. with divergence times, effective population sizes, migration events) to the msprime coalescent simulator by parsing a user-supplied species tree or network. Genealogies, sequences and metadata are returned in tabular format allowing for easy downstream analyses. ipcoal includes phylogenetic inference tools to automate gene tree inference from simulated sequence data, and visualization tools for analyzing results and verifying model accuracy. The ipcoal package is a powerful tool for posterior predictive data analysis, for methods validation and for teaching coalescent methods in an interactive and visual environment. Source code is available from the GitHub repository (https://github.com/pmckenz1/ipcoal/) and is distributed for packaged installation with conda. Complete documentation and interactive notebooks prepared for teaching purposes, including an empirical example, are available at https://ipcoal.readthedocs.io/. p.mckenzie@columbia.edu