famnesia
Anonymising Familias Files
A 'shiny' application for anonymising files exported from the
'Familias' software for forensic kinship analysis (Egeland et al.
(2000)
Famnesia 
Try Famnesia online here: https://magnusdv.shinyapps.io/famnesia/
Famnesia is a Shiny app for anonymising files from
Familias, a program for kinship calculations in
forensic genetics. Several other programs also take Familias .fam
files as input, including KLINK and
other tools in the pedsuite.
The aim of Famnesia is to enable safer sharing of .fam files, for
instance for:
- collaborative work and research
- troubleshooting and software support
- teaching and demonstrations
- reproducible examples and testing
How does Famnesia mask the data?
Available data maskings include:
- names of families, individuals, markers and alleles
- changing sex of individuals
- lumping unobserved alleles
- perturbing allele frequencies
- simplifying or disabling mutation models
The Analyse file feature offers three masking strategies adapted to
the input data:
Max: Maximal maskingSuggested: Balance strong masking with near-preserved LR valuesKeep LR: The strongest masking that preserves all LRs exactly
The result can be downloaded as a new .fam file.
Running locally
To run famnesia locally (and offline, if needed), first install the R package:
remotes::install_github("magnusdv/famnesia")
When the package is installed, the app can be started with a single R command:
famnesia::launchApp()
Limitations
- Files from the Familias DVI module are not yet supported.
- Displayed LRs within Famnesia currently ignore
thetacorrections, and only use the first two pedigrees in file.
(Buttheta’s and all pedigrees are included in the masked output file.) - While Famnesia substantially reduces the recognisable information, it does not guarantee that genetic data cannot be reidentified.