GEDmatch Tier 1 tools

[dtlroots]

Wondered whether any of you have tried the Tier 1 tools on GEDmatch, and if so whether you had found it was worth the money to try them? I know that you can buy them PAYG for a month.

Has anyone found the clustering and triangulation tools were useful enough to subscribe?

Also, if you just buy a month PAYG, has anyone had a problem with them auto-renewing, or had any badgering to subscribe?

[phil57]

I haven't tried the tools, but I have twice subscribed for a month only, to create a superkit from AS tests uploaded from different sources.

No issues at all with non-consensual autorenewal, or indeed any form of badgering. I do receive their newsletter periodically but have never been pressured or had any sales techniques presented to me in an effort to extract money.

[dtlroots]

Thanks Phil57.
That's reassuring on the renewal / badgering front.

I have only done the Ancestry test, but out of interest, what is the benefit of creating a 'superkit', which I take it somehow merges two or more DNA tests for the same person?

[phil57]

Yes, keeping it simple, different companies tests can contain slightly different areas of your DNA, so by combining two or more tests you can more accurately fill in segments that may be imputed in an individual test. The overall result is a general slight reduction in match lengths and removal of some false matches at lower levels. It can only be used on GedMatch though, you can't transfer it elsewhere.

I use the superkits as primary tests and have marked the donor tests as research kits, so they are ignored for matching purposes.

[Zaphod99]

Watch all the YouTube films.

Sign up for a month.

Run every report you can.

Save them.

Study them at length.

Sign up again when you understand them. It's brilliant.

Zaph

[dtlroots]

Phil57 thanks for the explanation.

Zaphod99, you make the case well and concisely - and thanks for all the fish.

[melba_schmelba]

Just a caveat to any thread on GEDMATCH, I would be wary of relying on any matches got from uploading any 23andme (2017-), MyHeritage (2019-), or FTDNA (2019-) tests which all use the GSA chip (introduced because it has more SNPs relevant to health conditions). These have a very low overlap to the GEDMATCH database SNPs which is based on the original SNPs of the first FTDNA autosomal test (which was also used by MyHeritage up until the end of 2018) and produce a very very high percentage of false matches, see this thread

https://anthrogenica.com/showthread.php?25236-Compared-23andme-Ancestry-and-merged-GEDMATCH-kit-huge-false-matches-on-23andme

At the moment, the cheapest way to get a match list of OK reliablility is to upload an Ancestry test, and if you have any other test you can increase the reliability by making a combined Superkit with the Tier 1 tools (the kits remain after your subscription runs out). The more expensive way is to get a test that uses all the original FTDNA SNPs with a Whole Genome Sequence (£400+)

https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=861091.msg7302573#msg7302573

But even then, low matches to GSA chip kits will probably be fairly unreliable, just not as a high a percentage unreliable as GSA-GSA matching on GEDMATCH.

[dtlroots]

Thanks for all the help and advice with this.
I have taken the one month PAYG and have been running various reports, which has kept me quite busy.
I managed to persuade a DNA match to put his kit on GEDMatch as he is one of very few maternal relatives / matches for whom I can confidently know our MRCAs - I have others with whom I share maternal grandparents, but that doesn't really tell me anything about shared matches.
Anyway, when I ran the AutoSegment tool it produced plenty of matches (pile-up segments provide a question for another day!), but I was surprised to find that my known match (a 3rd cousin matching at about 90cM) did not appear in the list of matches in the output. Our matches show clearly using other tools, so I really don't understand this.
His kit has only been on for 2 days, but surely it must have been fully processed to show up in other tools.
Has anyone else found a similar problem?

Dave