assignPOP: An r package for population assignment using genetic, non‐genetic, or integrated data in a machine‐learning framework

Abstract The use of biomarkers (e.g., genetic, microchemical and morphometric characteristics) to discriminate among and assign individuals to a population can benefit species conservation and management by facilitating our ability to understand population structure and demography. Tools that can evaluate the reliability of large genomic datasets for population discrimination and assignment, as well as allow their integration with non‐genetic markers for the same purpose, are lacking. Our r package, assign POP , provides both functions in a supervised machine‐learning framework. assign POP uses Monte‐Carlo and K ‐fold cross‐validation procedures, as well as principal component analysis, to estimate assignment accuracy and membership probabilities, using training (i.e., baseline source population) and test (i.e., validation) datasets that are independent. A user then can build a specified predictive model based on the relative sizes of these datasets and classification functions, including linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine, naïve Bayes, decision tree and random forest. assign POP can benefit any researcher who seeks to use genetic or non‐genetic data to infer population structure and membership of individuals. assign POP is a freely available r package under the GPL license, and can be downloaded from CRAN or at https://github.com/alexkychen/assignPOP . A comprehensive tutorial can also be found at https://alexkychen.github.io/assignPOP/ .