An EM algorithm to improve the estimation of the probability of clonal relatedness of pairs of tumors in cancer patients

We previously introduced a random-effects model to analyze a set of patients, each of which has two distinct tumors. The goal is to estimate the proportion of patients for which one of the tumors is a metastasis of the other, i.e. where the tumors are clonally related. Matches of mutations within a tumor pair provide the evidence for clonal relatedness.