Deep Learning for Population Genetic Inference with Dan Schrider

Today we're joined by Dan Schrider, assistant professor in the department of genetics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My discussion with Dan starts with an overview of population genomics and from there digs into his application of machine learning in the field, allowing us to, for example, better understand population size changes and gene flow from DNA sequences. We then dig into Dan's paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks in Population Genetic Inference," which was published in the Molecular Biology and Evolution journal, which examines the idea that CNNs are capable of outperforming expert-derived statistical methods for some key problems in the field.