On minimizing assignment errors and the trade-off between false positives and negatives in parentage analysis

Hugo B. Harrison, Pablo Saenz Agudelo, Serge Planes, Geoffrey P. Jones, Michael L. Berumen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Genetic parentage analyses provide a practical means with which to identify parent-offspring relationships in the wild. In Harrison et al.'s study (2013a), we compare three methods of parentage analysis and showed that the number and diversity of microsatellite loci were the most important factors defining the accuracy of assignments. Our simulations revealed that an exclusion-Bayes theorem method was more susceptible to false-positive and false-negative assignments than other methods tested. Here, we analyse and discuss the trade-off between type I and type II errors in parentage analyses. We show that controlling for false-positive assignments, without reporting type II errors, can be misleading. Our findings illustrate the need to estimate and report both the rate of false-positive and false-negative assignments in parentage analyses. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)5738-5742
Number of pages5
JournalMolecular Ecology
Volume22
Issue number23
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 4 2013

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
  • Genetics

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