simmr: An open-source tool to perform simulations in Mendelian Randomization

Abstract

Mendelian Randomization (MR) has become a popular tool for inferring causality of risk factors on disease. There are currently over 45 different methods available to perform MR, reflecting this extremely active research area. It would be desirable to have a standard simulation environment to objectively evaluate the existing and future methods. We present simmr, an open-source software for performing simulations to evaluate the performance of MR methods in a range of scenarios encountered in practice. Researchers can directly modify the simmr source code so that the research community may arrive at a widely accepted frame-work for researchers to evaluate the performance of different MR methods.