# Testing Multispecies Coalescent Simulators using Summary Statistics

## TL;DR

This paper develops statistical tools to evaluate the accuracy of multispecies coalescent simulators, ensuring they produce valid samples, and provides an R package for easy testing of future simulators.

## Contribution

It introduces new summary statistic-based tests for validating MSC simulators and uncovers flaws in existing tools, with implementation in an accessible R package.

## Key findings

- Identified flaws in several published MSC simulators
- Developed statistical tests for simulator validation
- Provided an R package for easy performance checking

## Abstract

As genomic scale datasets motivate research on species tree inference, simulators of the multispecies coalescent (MSC) process are essential for the testing and evaluation of new inference methods. However, the simulators themselves must be tested to ensure they give valid samples from the coalescent process. In this work we develop several statistical tools using summary statistics to evaluate the fit of a simulated gene tree sample to the MSC model. Using these tests on samples from four published simulators, we uncover flaws in several. The tests are implemented as an R package, so that both developers and users will be able to easily check proper performance of future simulators.