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 masking
• Suggested: Balance strong masking with near-preserved LR values
• Keep 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 theta corrections, and only use the first two pedigrees in file.
  (But theta’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.