Forensic identification with environmental samples

Gregory Ditzler, Gail Rosen, Robi Polikar

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

The field of forensics aims to understand the physical biomarkers that make each person unique. Recently, it has been discovered that one of the traits that makes us unique from one another are the composition of the microbial communities found throughout our bodies. For example, identical twins who share the same set of DNA may have vastly different microbial communities in or on various body sites. It was recently discovered that microbial communities can be exploited for forensic identification by clustering samples from individual's skin and objects that they may have previously touched. Typically, this is done by using basic multi-dimensional scaling analysis using phylogenetic distances. In this work, we circumvent the use of phylogenetic distances by using the raw community abundances, and we present an application of kernels for metagenomic data analysis. In addition, we show that strategic selection of features can improve classification accuracy.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012 - Proceedings
Pages1861-1864
Number of pages4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Externally publishedYes
Event2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012 - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: Mar 25 2012Mar 30 2012

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Conference

Conference2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2012
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period3/25/123/30/12

Keywords

  • bioinformatics
  • forensics
  • metagenomics

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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