Assessing simulation-based supervised machine learning for demographic parameter inference from genomic data

The ever-increasing availability of high-throughput DNA sequences and the development of numerous computational methods have led to considerable advances in our understanding of the evolutionary and demographic history of populations. Several demographic inference methods have been developed to take advantage of these massive genomic data. Simulation-based approaches, such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), have proved particularly efficient for complex demographic models. However, taking full advantage of the comprehensive information contained in massive genomic data remains a challenge for demographic inference methods, which generally rely on partial information from these data. Using advanced computational methods, such as machine learning, is valuable for efficiently integrating more comprehensive information. Here, we showed how simulation-based supervised machine learning methods applied to an extensive range of summary statistics are effective in inferring demographic parameters for connected populations. We compared three machine learning (ML) methods: a neural network, the multilayer perceptron (MLP), and two ensemble methods, random forest (RF) and the gradient boosting system XGBoost (XGB), to infer demographic parameters from genomic data under a standard isolation with migration model and a secondary contact model with varying population sizes. We showed that MLP outperformed the other two methods and that, on the basis of permutation feature importance, its predictions involved a larger combination of summary statistics. Moreover, they outperformed all three tested ABC algorithms. Finally, we demonstrated how a method called SHAP, from the field of explainable artificial intelligence, can be used to shed light on the contribution of summary statistics within the ML models.