Department of Biostatistics Seminar/Workshop Series

Data Wrangling and Automating Summary Reports For Ultramarathon Finishing Times

Jeff Horner, BS

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

The marathon is a long distance running event, officially 42.195 kilometers (or 26.2 miles) in length. However ultramarathons are longer, ranging from 50 kilometers (31.0686 miles) to 100 miles and beyond. This talk will tackle web scraping ultramarathon data with the R packages XML and rjson, transforming data with the plyr package, and automating summary reports with knitr and brew. We will explore parsing HTML using the XPath query language, transforming JSON objects to data frames, combining both brew syntax and knitr syntax together, and automating the creation of knitr reports.

Notes from the Talk