Ancestry.com principally and 23andMe.com to a lesser extent let you use their genealogical services to assemble a family tree. I will focus on Ancestry there, but similar reasoning applies to 23andMe.com. There are two components to the family-tree building process, the PAPER of existing records and the BIOLOGY of DNA samples which both services analyze. However there is a glaring problem of when it comes to certifying the authenticity of family trees derived from historical documents, that is, PAPER. Do you trust the source? Can you read the document? Are the spelling changes plausible and if so how much? By using both DNA and PAPER one can cross check one against the other to confirm authentic lineages and refute specious ones. But there must be quality control in both the PAPER and the DNA. Laboratory techniques for DNA handling use statistical quality control methods that are reliable, however there is no equivalent quality control methodology for PAPER, which in large part has been converted to MICROFILM and digitized with varying levels of quality control image processing. There are chain of custody issues when one submits a DNA sample to both services and one should really submit multiple samples to be sure that the correct sample has been tested and labeled. There are also handing issues as samples make their way through the mail, postal and delivery systems. More or less the later issues are being addressed.
Ancestry.com currently requires you to chase hints in time and space to determine if you are related to a given candidate ancestor listed in a public record or another family tree. For large trees this can be extremely labor intensive, without guarantee that one has constructed a forensically certifiable result.
One error source is this; Ancestry let's you use other's family trees that are themselves mashups of information of dubious origin and there is no rhyme or reason to confirming whether information in these other trees is accurate. In other words there is no quality control. No assurance that one is dealing in fact.
The addition of DNA helps one connect with living ancestors and to add ground truth to previously assembled trees. There are forensic methodologies that increase certainty, such as this: when independent sources of information confirm the information. The more redundancy of independent records, the higher the certainty that the conclusions, the facts are authentic.
The problem is, after ones' family tree gets to an interesting level of complexity, the number of hints grows exponentially and many of the 'hints' lead to completely specious assemblies of data.
The fix to this is to associate with each tree, and with each fact in each tree, a certainty that the fact in the tree is indeed true. For a given ancestral line, these certainties can be multiplied together to provide a composite value that indicates the reliability of information. As a detail certainty is a number between 0 and 1 inclusive. A 1 means certainty is complete (which never exists in the real world of statistics). A 0 means there is no certainty whatsoever. A certainty of 0.9 means that the fact has a 90% chance of being true. If we chain two facts together each with certainty of 0.9 we have a 0.81% certainty that both facts are true.
There are a host of microfilmed documents from all over the earth that have been read, digitized and collated by human beings and many of these have been collected by Ancestry.com in what constitutes a controlling monopoly over historical ancestral information. This source of this control, this power has its roots in Mormonism. This can be good thing in that there is a single long-term historical and motivating organization or presence. This could be a bad thing if religious exclusion occurs.
The point of my open letter is this:
Recent advances in machine learning would enable PAPER documents to be parsed by machines and would associate with each fact gleaned from them a level of certainty. Previous entries in this blog discuss summarize these advances in detail.
The Mormon Church and Ancestry.com have close affiliations. In Salt Lake City, Utah, both have excelled in using advanced computation to solve important problems.
The problem is that there is a financial conflict of interest at play. Many families have invested generations of time and thousands of hours of work in building family trees using manual and computational methods. They may not take kindly to having their work, especially closely-held beliefs or assumptions questioned when those beliefs provide them with self-esteem or status in the community.
For people who have spent 30 years justifying that they are related to a Hindenburg or a Henry the 2nd like myself, this will be good news and bad news. It will be good news in that it will allow a more comprehensive family tree to be assembled, more RAPIDLY with less human error. It will be GOOD NEWS that it will allow a precise certainty to be associated with each fact in the tree. It will be bad news for those who have a need to be related to someone famous or historic and are not and have significant social capital in those claims.
I have a large tree of both famous and historic ancestors, including kings and martyrs. But I would gladly trade it off for a complete and accurate picture of who I am actually related to.
Mainly, I don't have time to chase the 31,000 hints that have popped up in my Ancestry.com Family Tree, especially when I know that machines can do it better. To that end, it is time to make more exhaustive and complete use of handwriting and document analysis using the burgeoning progress taking place in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The opportunity for true and factual historical insight could be spectacular.
No comments:
Post a Comment