Consensus Methods for Reconstruction of Sibling Relationships from Genetic Data

Contents

Kinship analysis using genetic data is important for many biological applications, including many in conservation biology. A number of methods have been proposed for this problem. However, in absence of a true answer, biologists today find it challenging to consolidate different reconstructions into one solution. Towards this end, consensus based methodology has been proposed recently to combine different results. In this paper we study the use of different consensus techniques, including strict consensus, voting consensus, majority consensus, to realize a single solution. We also discuss the relative merits of different consensus techniques and extend their use to data sets with genotyping errors. We explain the implications of Mirkin's impossibility results in the context of the siblings reconstruction problem.