What Is A Bayesian Skyline Plot?

Question

[ericmajinglong]

I've been reading some of the influenza literature (Rambaut, A. et al. The genomic and epidemiological dynamics of human influenza A virus. Nature 453, 615–619 (2008).), and found that these authors used a "Bayesian Skyline Plot" to represent their data. Does anybody know what that is?

Answer 1

[lh3]

If you search "bayesian skyline plot", you will find its original paper. Briefly, it is a method to infer the historical effective population size given multiple haploid genomes without recombinations. Naively, it gets the size information from the density of branches in a coalescent tree. The Bayesian version does not rely on a single tree. Bayesian skyline plot is a very good method. IIRC, it is implemented in BEAST.