A rapid accurate approach to inferring pedigrees in endogamous populations.

ABSTRACT: Accurate reconstruction of pedigrees from genetic data remains a challenging problem. Many relationship categories (e.g. half-sibships vs avuncular) can be difficult to distinguish without external information. Pedigree inference algorithms are often trained on European-descent families in urban locations. Thus, existing methods tend to perform poorly in endogamous populations for which there may be reticulations within the pedigrees and elevated haplotype sharing. We present a simple, rapid algorithm which initially uses only high-confidence first-degree relationships to seed a machine learning step based on summary statistics of identity-by-descent sharing. One of these statistics, our "haplotype score," is novel and can be used to: (1) distinguish half-sibling pairs from avuncular or gr

SUBMITTER: Williams CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12341879 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature