A half-day introduction to the {targets} framework for R projects.
This workshop is for useRs interested in smarter, faster, and more reproducible
data analysis project workflows. You will learn about the R package {targets}
and why it is one of the most important tools for 'getting stuff done' with R
since the {tidyverse}. The objective of this session is to jump start your
{targets} knowledge, and walk through the process of refactoring an existing
project to take advantage {targets}.
Participants should have prior experience working through at least one challenging data analysis project using R.
Miles McBain is a Data Scientist and R package developer who has been using {targets} since release for large data analysis projects in the Public and Not-for-profit sectors.
| time | topic |
|---|---|
| TBA | Motivating Targets: Strengths and weaknesses of typical R project workflows |
| TBA | Pure functions and their benefits as units of work |
| TBA | The {targets} plan and the two kinds of reproducibility |
| TBA | New debugging access panels |
| TBA | Divide and conquer with branching |
| TBA | Long vs Wide processes |
| TBA | Things that may go wrong and where to get help |
| TBA | Advanced topics: Meta-programming, Tarcheytypes, Multi-plan projects, Cloud computing |
As we step through each topic we'll refactor our starter project using our new knowledge.
-
You should have a reasonably up to date version of R (e.g. 4.3+), and a text editor setup you feel comfortable being productive with (E.g. RStudio, VSCode, ESS + Emacs, Vim + NvimR). It's going to be less typing if you can use the
{rstudioapi}via either RStudio or VSCode. -
Make sure you have these packages installed:
install.packages('pak') # works better / faster than install.packages, especially on Windows.
pak::pkg_install(c(
"conflicted",
"dplyr",
"galah",
"ggplot2",
"h3jsr",
"lubridate",
"pROC",
"purrr",
"randomForest",
"readr",
"rmarkdown",
"rsample",
"sf",
"tibble",
"tidyr",
"targets",
"tarchetypes",
"crew"
))
If you're a Linux user sf might give you some challenges (but you're used to that, right?). Be sure to study their README.
- likewise for
V8dep ofh3jsr, see static lib option for linux described in README.
-
Our example project is going to pull data from the Atlas of Living Australia, so create an account with a valid email address, here: https://auth.ala.org.au/userdetails/registration/createAccount
-
Ahead of the workshop any time you can spend reviewing the example project will be worthwile, so the project content itself can be les distracting. See:
- I'll be using keyboard shortcuts for a couple of RStudio Addins provided by {targets}, in particular:
- 'Run a targets pipeline in the foreground'
- 'Load target at cursor'
You may also enjoy creating keyboard shortcuts for these.