A quick roundup of any interesting January 2020 activities
Welcome to the January 2020 roundup! Similar to last time I’m going to experiment with documenting anything interesting I come across (articles, lectures, books, papers etc.) and any activities I get up to. This is more for my personal benefit but may also help others.
Came across this nice article on R error handling. See here for the original source.
Key Takeaways
Using functions like assertthat::noNA(df$source) will return a FALSE if in fact there are no NA values in the df$source column. This seems like a very useful function to use in %>% operations in my pipelines!
Used in combination with assertthat::noNA(df$source) will return the actual observations that have NA values, which is super useful!
These operations are %>% friendly and can be used to verify join operations perform as expected, for example:
Does the join have the same number of rows as the original left-hand table or did the data structure of the right-hand table create new rows?
How much of the right-hand table of the join falls away in the left join?
These checks are notably useful for the ACLU to also check for missingness in their data pipelines. They note:
A helpful check to assess whether missingness grossly misrepresents our results is to quantify the severity of the problem. What level of missingness are we willing to live with?
This definitely seems useful to me, as I use ad-hoc approaches to these same issues e.g. na.omit without doing thorough assertions. Perhaps using this with tidylog will be useful in doing EDA. Let’s try and revisit this.
This is a really insightful article on A regular person’s guide to outbreak preparedness, by Prof. Eleanor Murray:
Key Takeaways
Please read the article on more detail on each of the above points and also to considerations for high risk individuals, a sick family member/friend, and if you are a healthcare responder
Overall, great practical advice! It is great to see statisticians such as Prof. Murray take the lead and address the community at large with their knowledge and expertise, when we live in an era of misinformation
I enjoyed the emphasisis on solving this challenge (like many others) as a community
If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.
For attribution, please cite this work as
Shrotriya (2020, Jan. 27). Shamindra Shrotriya: Shamindra's January 2020 Roundup. Retrieved from https://www.shamindras.com/posts/2020-01-27-shrotriya2020january20roundup/
BibTeX citation
@misc{shrotriya2019january20roundup,
author = {Shrotriya, Shamindra},
title = {Shamindra Shrotriya: Shamindra's January 2020 Roundup},
url = {https://www.shamindras.com/posts/2020-01-27-shrotriya2020january20roundup/},
year = {2020}
}