Comparing identification methods for DNA investigations of crimes and accidents

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ollikainen, Jukka | Juhola, Martti^{; *}

Affiliations: Department of Computer Sciences, 33014 University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Tel.: +358 3 35517972; Fax: +358 3 35516070; E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: We examined an identifier matching problem, where an identifier corresponds to pieces of information extracted from DNA samples associated with crime suspects or victims of accidents. Such a sample is matched to cases of a database in order to identify a person. The data we used had been encoded as integers of relevantly small intervals. We solved the identifier matching task by sorting the data and then making comparisons for a maximally reduced subset of data produced by sorting. We first constructed a simple baseline method with exhaustive search, its optimised version and compared their results to those of the sort-based method, which was superior to the former two.

Keywords: DNA data, DNA identification of persons, comparison of DNA identifiers

DOI: 10.3233/IDA-2008-12407

Journal: Intelligent Data Analysis, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 409-423, 2008