No major flaws in “Identification of individuals by trait prediction using whole-genome sequencing data”

In a recently published PNAS article, we studied the identifiability of genomic samples using machine learning methods []. In a response, argued that our work contained major flaws. The main technical critique of builds on a simulation experiment that shows that our proposed algorithm, which uses only a genomic sample for identification, performed no better than a strategy that uses demographic variables. Below, we show why this comparison is misleading and provide a detailed discussion of the key critical points in our analyses that have been brought up in and in the media. Further, not only faces may be derived from DNA, but a wide range of phenotypes and demographic variables. In this light, the main contribution of is an algorithm that identifies genomes of individuals by combining multiple DNA-based predictive models for a myriad of traits.