Fast estimation of recombination rates using topological data analysis

NOTA BENE: This talk will take place at 10am.

In this talk, I will describe recent work (joint with McGuirl, Miyagi, and Humphreys) that uses topological features to infer recombination rates from genomic data. Building on work of Camara, Levine, and Rabadan, we show that low-dimensional persistent homology contains a great deal of information about recombination. Perhaps most interestingly, we are able to explain the qualitative behavior of various topological features in terms of standard coalescent theory.