[R-sig-ME] Kinship vs. Pedigreemm

[Joehanes, Roby (NIH/NHLBI) [F]]

Dear all:

I wonder if any of you are familiar with both packages Kinship and PedigreeMM? What are the major differences other than Kinship using NLME and PedigreeMM using LME4? From the source code, though, the main Kinship routine, lmekin, does not appear to use nlme; it appears to minimize the likelihood function directly using optim (L-BFGS-B option).

Also, it appears that package Kinship has been obsoleted from the CRAN. Why is that? Is it because Kinship package has been largely obsoleted by PedigreeMM?

Thank you,
Roby