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Quantitative Biology > Genomics

arXiv:2010.02985 (q-bio)
[Submitted on 6 Oct 2020]

Title:Likelihood Models for Forensic Genealogy

Authors:William H. Press, John Hawkins
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Abstract:In the idealized Morgan model of crossover, we study the probability distributions of shared DNA (identical by descent) between individuals having a wide range of relationships (not just lineal descendants), especially cases for which previous work produces inaccurate results. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we show that a particular, complicated functional form with just one continuous fitted parameter accurately approximates the distributions in all cases tried. Analysis of that functional form shows that it is close to a normal distribution, not in shared fraction f, but in the square-root of f. We describe a multivariate normal model in this variable for use as a practical framework for several general tasks in forensic genealogy that are currently done by less-accurate and less well-founded methods.
Comments: 26 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables
Subjects: Genomics (q-bio.GN)
Cite as: arXiv:2010.02985 [q-bio.GN]
  (or arXiv:2010.02985v1 [q-bio.GN] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2010.02985

Submission history

From: William H. Press [view email]
[v1] Tue, 6 Oct 2020 19:23:26 UTC (169 KB)
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