Click It and Ship It: Using Packages to Make R Code Easier and More Reliable

R's packaging system is one of the features that sets it apart from other statistical programming environments. The ability to access user-generated functions and documentation of reasonable quality (over 5,000 packages on CRAN and counting) with just a simple command is what makes R such a vibrant computing ecosystem. I will share my experience building and maintaining R packages both for private and public use. This talk will start with a demonstration of how to use RStudio to easily go from a few scripted functions to a full package. I will discuss some of the key components of what makes an R package such as the Namespace, documentation, Description and License files. I will so discuss the distribution, maintenance, and approval process of publishing packages online.

Jared Knowles currently serves as a research analyst with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. There he has led the design and deployment of the Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System (DEWS) and has worked on numerous policy analyses for the department. He focuses on ways to display results in ways that are interpretable and actionable by decision makers. He is completing his PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison this May, with a dissertation examining the politics of school boards in Wisconsin. He is also a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences, an IES pre-doctoral training program in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Jared has been using R for seven years now and is the co-author of the caretEnsemble package as well as the author of the eeptools package. You can find him on GitHub and Twitter, @jknowles