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