Title: Analysis of the Genealogy Process in Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy
Abstract: The genealogy process is typically the most time-consuming part of -- and a limiting factor in the success of -- forensic investigative genetic genealogy, which is a new approach to solving violent crimes and identifying human remains. We formulate a stochastic dynamic program that -- given the list of matches and their genetic distances to the unknown target -- chooses the best decision at each point in time: which match to investigate (i.e., find its ancestors), which ancestors of these matches to descend from (i.e., find its descendants), or whether to terminate the investigation. The objective is to maximize the probability of finding the target minus a cost on the expected size of the final family tree. We estimate the parameters of our model using data from 17 cases (eight solved, nine unsolved) from the DNA Doe Project. We assess the Proposed Strategy using simulated versions of the 17 DNA Doe Project cases, and compare it to a Benchmark Strategy that ranks matches by their genetic distance to the target and only descends from known common ancestors between a pair of matches. The Proposed Strategy solves cases 25-fold faster than the Benchmark Strategy, and does so by aggressively descending from a set of potential most recent common ancestors between the target and a match even when this set has a low probability of containing the correct most recent common ancestor.
Bio: Lawrence M. Wein is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Management Science at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He received a Ph.D. in Operations Research at Stanford University in 1988 and was a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management from 1988 to 2002. His research interests are in operations management and public health. He was Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research from 2000 to 2005. He has been awarded a Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Erlang Prize, the Koopman Prize, the INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the Philip McCord Morse Lectureship, the INFORMS President’s Award, the Frederick W. Lanchester Prize, the George E. Kimball Medal, a best paper award from Risk Analysis, and two notable paper awards from the Journal of Forensic Sciences. He is an INFORMS Fellow, a M&SOM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
