/ssa_targets_workshop

A half-day introduction to {targets}

Working smarter with Targets

A half-day introduction to the {targets} framework for R projects.

Summary

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}.

Target audience

Participants should have prior experience working through at least one challenging data analysis project using R.

Presenter

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.

Structure of workshop

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.

Getting started

  1. 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.

  2. 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 V8 dep of h3jsr, see static lib option for linux described in README.

  1. 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

  2. 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:

  1. 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.

Content

https://milesmcbain.github.io/ssa_targets_workshop/