unused/README.md

In deepankardatta/blandr: Bland-Altman Method Comparison

blandr: a Bland-Altman package for R

blandr is a package to carry out Bland-Altman analyses (also known as a Tukey mean-difference plot) in R. This package was started in 2015 as existing Bland-Altman R functions did not calculate confidence intervals: my belief is that when drawing Bland-Altman plots, confidence intervals should be considered the gold-standard. blandr fills this need!

blandr further generates plotting data to allow easy generation of charts using ggplot, as well as R's in-built drawing capabilities.

Why should I use it?

To get an open-source library that allows replicable Bland-Altman analysises using R. Further it generates and plots confidence intervals for Bland-Altman method comparisons: something that other libraries do not seem to generate.

How do I get it?

Currently the code is hosted at https://github.com/deepankardatta/blandr/ - in future I hope it will be available on CRAN for easy integration into R

How do I use it?

As the library is not on CRAN (yet) the best way is to: 1. download the code 2. build the package 3. load the package - library(blendr) 4. see the vignettes for test cases

Why release a version <1.0?

I am believer that if the function is good enough to work, I should just publish, see if others can improve it and just iterate slowly to get to a version 1.0. What counts as a 1.0? Well I'd like other people to help validate it, and add a few more functions, to a point there should not be much more to add to this.

From what I've read this is what's called a "Minimum Viable Product" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product).

Why the name?

Thinking of a unique name was difficult - and it wasn't worth spending/wasting time on this initially. Curiously it was going to be called BlandAltmanEdinburgh (as I was in Edinburgh at the time I made this) until I considerd uploading this to GitHub and CRAN.

Hadley Wickham has an excellent set of documentation on creating packages. The one on naming (http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/package.html) is worth a read. Reflecting on it a lot of the naming issues are to prevent collisions with similarly named packages, so using blandaltman in the name might have cause problems. Mirroring the pre-existing plyr and knitr I thought I'd just add a "r" to "bland": yes it doesn't involve Altman's name, but I couldn't think of anything better.

If you can think of a better name please let me know!

Further information

Further information can be found in the function help files in the package, as well as in the vignettes.

Future improvements

Whilst this package is good enough for use, there is the scope for iterative improvements.

Future works include: I need to take out the last references to BlandAltmanEdinburgh and change it to blandr. There are a further few deprecated functions to delete (I just need to finish a few projects first!!). The package needs to have to go through some validation and testing For further testing I need to write some testhtat modules The function descriptions needs to be improved Some of the roxygen2 documentation can be improved by calling the import parameters function * I want to add a few more sample data packs: including some of my own if possible!

Help wanted!

Comments on the code, suggestions for improvement, verification tests, validation studies, and even code contributions would be gratefully accepted. Email me at [e-mail] and I'll try and get back to you as soon as possible. Please do bear in mind this is a side-project, and I can be otherwise busy with a lot of other work.

deepankardatta/blandr documentation built on March 28, 2020, 7:55 a.m.