This study developed, validated, and assessed vcferr, a tool to probabilistically simulate genotyping error and missingness in variant call format (VCF) files.
The authors of this study developed and validated vcferr, a tool to probabilistically simulate genotyping error and missingness in variant call format (VCF) files, demonstrated how vcferr could be used to address a research question by introducing varying levels of error of different type into a sample in a simulated pedigree, and assessed how kinship analysis degrades as a function of the kind and type of error. Genotyping error can impact downstream single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based analyses. Simulating various modes and levels of error can help investigators better understand potential biases caused by miscalled genotypes. This software, vcferr, is available for installation via PyPi (https://pypi.org/project/vcferr/) or conda (https://anaconda.org/bioconda/vcferr). The software is released under the MIT license with source code available on GitHub (https://github.com/signaturescience/vcferr). (Published Abstract Provided)