A commentary on some recent methods in sibling group reconstruction based on set coverings
The use of genotypic markers for kinship estimation within natural populations has become an important research tool. The nonstandard nature of the problem has led to the necessity of developing specialized statistical and computational algorithms. In this note, one such algorithm for the reconstruction of sibling groups (without information on the parental cohort) is examined [A. Chaovalitwongse, T.Y. Berger-Wolf, B. DasGupta, and M.V. Ashley, Set covering approach for reconstruction of sibling relationships, Optim. Meth. Softw. 22 (2007), pp. 11-24.]. It is found that the algorithm and the method used to evaluate its accuracy have a number of serious flaws.
computational biology genetics combinatorial optimization