Efficient computations with the likelihood ratio distribution

We present three new approaches to the problem. Firstly, we show how importance sampling can be used to make the simulation approach significantly more efficient. Importance sampling is a statistical technique that turns out to work well in the current context. Secondly, we present a novel algorithm for computing exceedance probabilities. The algorithm is exact, fast and can handle relatively large problems. Thirdly, we introduce an approach that combines the novel algorithm with the discrete approximation of Corradi and Ricciardi. This last approach can be applied to very large problems and yields a lower and upper bound on the exceedance probability. The use of the different approaches is illustrated with examples from forensic genetics, such as kinship testing, familial searching and mixture interpretation. The algorithms are implemented in an R-package called DNAprofiles, which is freely available from CRAN.