Statistical aspects of familial searching

Abstract

Familial Searching is the process of looking for relatives, by comparing DNA profiles, of a fixed (typically unknown) individual C in a database of known persons. The appropriate likelihood ratios for kinship best summarize the genetic evidence in favour of relatedness for every database member separately. We present probabilistic models to interpret all these likelihood ratios together, and strategies to identify relatives with a certain probability. © 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd.