| Title: | ukbtools: An R package to manage and query UK Biobank data |
| Journal: | PLOS ONE |
| Published: | 31 May 2019 |
| Pubmed: | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31150407/ |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214311 |
| URL: | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0214311&type=printable |
Publication 7284
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Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The UK Biobank (UKB) is a resource that includes detailed health-related data on about 500,000 individuals and is available to the research community. However, several obstacles limit immediate analysis of the data: data files vary in format, may be very large, and have numerical codes for column names.RESULTS: ukbtools removes all the upfront data wrangling required to get a single dataset for statistical analysis. All associated data files are merged into a single dataset with descriptive column names. The package also provides tools to assist in quality control by exploring the primary demographics of subsets of participants; query of disease diagnoses for one or more individuals, and estimating disease frequency relative to a reference variable; and to retrieve genetic metadata.
CONCLUSION: Having a dataset with meaningful variable names, a set of UKB-specific exploratory data analysis tools, disease query functions, and a set of helper functions to explore and write genetic metadata to file, will rapidly enable UKB users to undertake their research.
4 Authors
- Ken B. Hanscombe
- Jonathan R. I. Coleman
- Matthew Traylor
- Cathryn M. Lewis
Enabling scientific discoveries that improve human health