clusIBD: Robust Detection of Identity-by-descent (IBD) Segments Using Unphased Genetic Data from Poor-quality DNA Samples

Inferring relatedness through the detection of identity-by-descent (IBD) segments is widely used in many fields. However, existing methods are often powerless for poor-quality DNA samples. Here, we propose a method, clusIBD, which can robustly detect IBD segments using unphased genetic data with high genotype errors. We evaluated and compared the performance of clusIBD with IBIS, TRUFFLE, and IBDseq using simulated data, artificial poor-quality materials and ancient DNA samples. The results showed that clusIBD outperformed these state-of-the-art existing tools and may be a promising tool for kinship inference in fields such as ancient DNA analysis and criminal investigation (freely available at https://github.com/Ryan620/clusIBD/).