ukbtools: An R package to manage and query UK Biobank data.

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.