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While full-sibling group reconstruction from microsatellite data is a well-studied problem, reconstruction of half-sibling groups is much less studied, theoretically challenging, and computationally demanding. In this paper, we present a formulation of the half-sibling reconstruction problem and prove its APX-hardness. We also present exact solutions for this formulation and develop heuristics. Using biological and synthetic datasets we present experimental results and compare them with the leading alternative software COLONY. We show that our results are competitive and allow half-sibling group reconstruction in the presence of polygamy, which is prevalent in nature.

Kinship analysis using genetic data is important for many biological applications, including many in conservation biology. Wide availability of microsatellites has boosted studies in wild populations that rely on the knowledge of kinship, particularly sibling relationships (sibship). While there exist many methods for reconstructing sibling relationships, almost none account for errors and mutations in microsatellite data, which are prevalent and affect the quality of reconstruction. We present an error-tolerant method for reconstructing sibling relationships based on the concept of consensus methods. We test our approach on both real and simulated data, with both pre-existing and introduced errors. Our method is highly accurate on almost all simulations, giving over 90% accuracy in most cases. Ours is the first method designed to tolerate errors while making no assumptions about the population or the sampling.