Efficient Reconstruction of Stochastic Pedigrees

We introduce a new algorithm called sc Rec-Gen for reconstructing the genealogy or textitpedigree of an extant population purely from its genetic data. We justify our approach by giving a mathematical proof of the effectiveness of sc Rec-Gen when applied to pedigrees from an idealized generative model that replicates some of the features of real-world pedigrees. Our algorithm is iterative and provides an accurate reconstruction of a large fraction of the pedigree while having relatively low sample complexity, measured in terms of the length of the genetic sequences of the population. We propose our approach as a prototype for further investigation of the pedigree reconstruction problem toward the goal of applications to real-world examples. As such, our results have some conceptual bearing on the increasingly important issue of genomic privacy.