June Meetup: Literate programming and Writing a decision tree package for R
Description changed:
This month Anna Krystalli will present a exploration of literate programming, following up from a discussion on literate programming techniques at our meetup in April, and Pete Dodd will tell us about building an open source decision tree package in R.
Literate programming with Rmarkdown
In this session we'll explore the various options and strategies for literate programming and dynamic report generation in R and Rmarkdown. This session will make use of the literate programming packages knitr and rmarkdown.
Writing a decision tree package for R
Decision trees are a class of model widely used in health economic modelling. A tree (in the mathematical sense) has probabilities associated with branches leaving a node to describe the chances of a set of potential outcomes. In health economics, costs and health consequences are also associated with outcomes. By way of example, clinical diagnostic algorithms based on a sequence of symptom screens and diagnostic tests map particularly naturally into this framework. There are proprietary packages to develop, visualize and analyse such models, but nothing open-source and user-friendly. We describe an attempt to develop a package with a simple syntax for decision tree models in R based on the DOT language, which allows visualization, as well as considerable flexibility in analysis approach.
