Polygenic risk scores (PRSs) have improved substantially in predictive performance, yet results remain difficult to compare across studies that differ in cohorts, phenotype definitions, and evaluation procedures. Comparison to machine-learning methods is harder still, since their performance depends strongly on how data are partitioned and whether related individuals leak across splits. Here, we introduce a family-aware benchmark for polygenic prediction built on version 9 of the All of Us Research Program (AoU). The benchmark assigns entire family components to fixed discovery, calibration, and test partitions, reserves first-degree relatives for within-family evaluation, and separates models trained only on AoU discovery data from those using external GWAS summary statistics. This enables direct comparison between conventional PRS pipelines and machine-learning models trained under identical data budgets. We report results for 14 binary disease traits. Our strongest scores explain 5.7-24.9% of liability-scale variance, with particularly strong prediction for Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes, prostate cancer, glaucoma, and inflammatory bowel disease, and match or exceed published commercial and academic scores for most traits. Across 12 traits with interpretable within-family estimates of within-sibship-to-population effect ratio, 11 confidence intervals included a ratio of 1. Type 2 diabetes showed an attenuation ratio of 0.86 [0.76, 0.97].
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Ren et al. (2026) studied this question.
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