Simulating synthetic missing person databases for investigative purposes

Missing person search is a complex process that involves several steps. From preliminary investigation to DNA kinship test, several lines of evidence are collected during the process. Due to ethical and anonymity aspects, accounting for real databases of missing and unidentified persons is not so common. Nevertheless, having these datasets for investigative purposes is crucial to develop methods and tools for assisting in the search. Here, we fill this gap, providing functions for simulating missing person cases under different scenarios. Our methods are open-source available and integrated into the mispitools R package, freely available on CRAN.