Preface

Polygenic risk scores (PRS) are a popular methodology for assessing an individual's total genetic load due to common variations. While the methodology has become increasingly popular in recent years, the tools used to build and analyze PRS have remained inflexible and clunky. We have created the pRs package to help researchers quickly and easily construct PRS within the R environment on modest computational infrastructure.

This book accompanies the public release of the software package. It discusses the common methods behind PRS analysis and introduces readers to the package API.

In this package:

• We implement popular analysis pipelines using Rcpp and RcppArmadillo.
• We create convenience functions for commonly encountered scenarios.
• We introduce new methods in a complimentary article and detail their usage here.

This documentation is as short as possible; most readers will benefit from reading only the first few sections. Advanced readers may wish to consult later topics on more subtle details of the API.

Regardless, thank you for reading. We welcome any issues, pull requests, or comments on the general repository.