Skater: An R Package for SNP-based Kinship Analysis, Testing, and Evaluation

• NCJ Number: 307014
• Journal: F1000Research Volume: 11 Issue: 18 Dated: Jan 2022
• Author(s): Stephen D. Turner; V.P. Nagraj; Matthew Scholz; Shakeel Jessa; Carlos Acevedo; Jianye Ge; August E. Woerner; Bruce Budowle
• Date Published: January 2022
• Length: 18 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2019-DU-BX-0046
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Award: Dense DNA Data for Enhanced Missing Persons Identification

Annotation

This research reviews the Skater package as an R package for single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) based kinship analysis, testing, and evaluation.

Abstract

SNP-based kinship analysis with genome-wide relationship estimation and IBD segment analysis methods produces results that often require further downstream processing and manipulation. A dedicated software package that consistently and intuitively implements this analysis functionality is needed. Here the authors present the Skater R package for SNP-based kinship analysis, testing, and evaluation with R. The skater package contains a suite of well-documented tools for importing, parsing, and analyzing pedigree data, performing relationship degree inference, benchmarking relationship degree classification, and summarizing IBD segment data. The Skater package is implemented as an R package and is released under the MIT license at https://github.com/signaturescience/skater. Documentation is available at https://signaturescience.github.io/skater.