Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series

The R Seminar You Wish You'd Had Ten Years Ago

Cole Beck, BS

Computer Systems Analyst, Department of Biostatistics, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine

For someone in the computer science field, programming can be an art form. For a biostatistician it can be a necessary evil on the path to analysis. This talk will focus on how to re-think your approach to writing tedious R programs. It's inspired by examining an 8,000 line program written to validate data that was exported from RedCap. My objective is to save you future time: you'll write programs faster, you'll modify programs faster, and your programs will run faster. It might not make programming any more fun, but hopefully you'll spend a little less time worrying about it.