Software for calculating gene survival and multigene descent probabilities and for pedigree manipulation and drawing

Abstract

PEDPACK is a package of programs for pedigree analysis developed by Alun Thomas (Thomas 1987a and 1987b). Earlier versions of some of the programs were written by Elizabeth Thompson. This report is a user's manual and tutorial for some additions to PEDPACK and other programs for pedigree analysis written in the S language. One group of these programs is for pedigree manipulation: input and output of pedigrees, finding ancestors and descendants of groups of individuals, and generation of subpedigrees. A second group is for gene survival calculation: determining the probability density of gene survival, marginals of this distribution, and "trimming" pedigrees, producing smaller pedigrees plus auxiliary information that preserve the information necessary for gene survival calculation. A third group is for drawing pedigrees and includes a device driver that produces marriage node plots in the POSTSCRIPT page description language. Two appendices contain the on-line help files for these programs.