Advancing biogeographical ancestry predictions through machine learning

Tools like Snipper or the Admixture Model count as state-of-the-art methods in forensic science for biogeographical ancestry. However, they have not been systematically compared to classifiers widely used in other disciplines. Noting that genetic data have a tabular form, this study addresses this gap by benchmarking forensic classifiers against TabPFN, a cutting-edge, general-purpose machine learning classifier for tabular data. The comparison evaluates performance using metrics such as accuracy – the proportion of correct classifications – and ROC AUC. We examine classification tasks for individuals at both the intracontinental and continental levels, based on a published dataset for training and testing. Our results reveal significant performance differences between methods, with TabPFN consistently achieving the best results for accuracy, ROC AUC and log loss. E.g., for accuracy, TabPFN improves SNIPPER from 84% to 93% on a continental scale using eight populations, and from 43% to 48% for inter-European classification with ten populations.