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MCMC for forensic science

Quazi Irfan edited this page Mar 31, 2020 · 21 revisions

Background

Probabilistic genotyping algorithms are used to compute match probabilities in forensic science. But the field is dominated by closed-source proprietary software.

Some examples of other closed-source, proprietary software to compare against:

  • Peak height and size as input: STRMIX (author=buckleton), BulletProof (free for public use)
  • TrueAllele (author=perlin takes raw fsa files as input)

Related work

  • seqinr::read.abif reads the binary fsa format in which many EPGs are saved.

Details of your coding project

Write a new R package that implements the existing probabilistic genotyping algorithm described in https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0008327

Prototyping using the "Bayesian packages for general model fitting" listed here: https://cloud.r-project.org/web/views/Bayesian.html

After prototyping we may think about implementing our own (more efficient?) MCMC sampler in C++ and interfacing that with R.

Expected impact

This project will provide a new R package which will be useful for researchers in forensic science. It will provide a reference implementation of algorithms that are currently only available in proprietary/closed-source software.

Mentors

Students, please contact mentors below after completing at least one of the tests below.

Tests

Students, please do one or more of the following tests before contacting the mentors above.

MENTORS: write several tests that potential students can do to demonstrate their capabilities for this particular project. Ask some hard questions that will give you insight about how the students write code to solve problems. You'll see that the harder the questions that you ask, the easier it will be for you to choose between the students that apply for your project! Please modify the suggestions below to make them specific for your project.

Solutions of tests

Students, please post a link to your test results here.

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