/ds.targets

A series of meetups about data pipelines with the package targets

Primary LanguageROtherNOASSERTION

A series of meetups about data pipelines with the package “targets”.

Syllabus

Except for the first one, each item in this syllabus corresponds to a meetup and a GitHub release that preserves a snapshot of this repository exactly as it was shown during thee meetup.

We’ll follow targets’ manual but loosely.

Motivation

Meet Will Landau.

Walkthrough

Setup a minimal targets project from scratch.

Objectives:

  • Setup a file “_targets.R” and explore its structure.

  • Try common functions:

    • tar_script().
    • tar_edit().
    • tar_glimpse().
    • tar_make().
    • tar_visnetwork().
    • tar_objects().
    • tar_read().

  • Create a report using targets.

  • Understand the benefit.

Functions

This meetup adapts the examples shown in the “Functions” chapter of targets manual. It covers how to refactor a data science project, moving from a workflow based on a sequence of scripts to a workflow based on a pipeline of functions.

Objectives:

  • Explore an analysis structured as a sequence of scripts.

  • Make and use our own targets.

  • Report multiple analyses with the same superset of targets.

  • Transform code chunks into functions.

  • Report the analysis as using targets.

  • Make and use targets from the package targets.

Target cues

This meetup covers the rules that mark a target as outdated. It explores the helpfile of tar_cue(). After this session you will be more able to predict when tar_make() will either skip or run a target, and to set the options that trigger the behavior you want.

Objective:

Best practices

This meetup covers selected topics from the chapter Best Practices of target’s manual.

Objectives:

  • Understand how to define good targets.

  • Understand how to ignore or depend on changes in R packages.

External files and literate programming

This meetup covers selected topics from the chapter External files and literate programming of targets’s manual.

Objectives:

  • Understand what it means for a file to be external.

  • Understand how to use external files as inputs and outputs.

  • Use a superset of targets in a subset of workflows (rmarkdown files).

  • Use a targets factory to render rmarkdown reports inside the targets pipeline.

Debugging

This meetup covers the chapter Debugging of targets’s manual.

Objectives:

  • Understand three approaches to debugging, which the manual refers to as:
    • environment browser,
    • the debug option,
    • workspaces.

Next

We could cover branching (dynamic and static) and targets factories, but this might also be a good stopping point.

Resources