The mutual arrangement of Wright-Fisher diffusion path measures and its impact on parameter estimation

Abstract: The Wright-Fisher diffusion is a fundamentally important model of evolution encompassing genetic drift, mutation, and natural selection. Suppose you want to infer the parameters associated with these processes from an observed sample path. Then to write down the likelihood one first needs to know the mutual arrangement of two path measures under different parametrizations; that is, whether they are absolutely continuous, equivalent, singular, and so on. In this paper we give a complete answer to this question by finding the separating times for the diffusion - the stopping time before which one measure is absolutely continuous with respect to the other and after which the pair is mutually singular. In one dimension this extends a classical result of Dawson on the local equivalence between neutral and non-neutral Wright-Fisher diffusion measures. Along the way we also develop new zero-one type laws for the diffusion on its approach to, and emergence from, the boundary. As an application we derive an explicit expression for the joint maximum likelihood estimator of the mutation and selection parameters and show that its convergence properties are closely related to the separating time.