If you are working with data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP), perhaps these three small Octave/MATLAB utilities may be of some use:
- hcp2blocks.m: Takes the restricted file with information about kinship and zygosity and produces a multi-level exchangeability blocks file that can be used with PALM for permutation inference. It is fully described here.
- hcp2solar.m: Takes restricted and unrestricted files to produce a pedigree file that can be used with SOLAR for heritability and genome-wide association analyses.
- picktraits.m: Takes either restricted or unrestricted files, a list of traits and a list of subject IDs to produce tables with selected traits for the selected subjects. These can be used to, e.g., produce design matrices for subsequent analysis.
These functions need to parse relatively large CSV files, which is somewhat inefficient in MATLAB and Octave. Still, since these commands usually have to be executed only once for a particular analysis, a 1-2 minute wait seems acceptable.
If downloaded directly from the above links, remember also to download the prerequisites: strcsvread.m and strcsvwrite.m. Alternatively, clone the full repository from GitHub. The link is this. Other tools may be added in the future.
A fourth utility
For the HCP-S1200 release (March/2017), zygosity information is provided in the fields ZygositySR (self-reported zygosity) and ZygosityGT (zygosity determined by genetic methods for select subjects). If needed, these two fields can be merged into a new field named simply Zygosity. To do so, use a fourth utility, command mergezyg.