KinVis: a visualization tool to detect cryptic relatedness in genetic datasets.

Abstract

It is important to characterize individual relatedness in terms of familial relationships and underlying population structure in genome-wide association studies for correct downstream analysis. The characterization of individual relatedness becomes vital if the cohort is to be used as reference panel in other studies for association tests and for identifying ethnic diversities. In this paper, we propose a kinship visualization tool to detect cryptic relatedness between subjects. We utilize multi-dimensional scaling, bar charts, heat maps and node-link visualizations to enable analysis of relatedness information. Available online as well as can be downloaded at http://shiny-vis.qcri.org/public/kinvis/. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.