The goal of this paper is to help define a path toward a grammar for processing clinical trials by a) defining a format in which we would like to represent data from standardized clinical trial data b) describing a standard set of operations to transform clinical trial data into this format, and c) to identify a set of verbs and other functionality to facilitate data processing and encourage reproducibility in the processing of these data. It provides a background on standard clinical trial data and goes through a simple preprocessing example illustrating the value of the proposed approach through the use of the forceps package, which is currently being used for data of this kind.
Supplementary materials are available in addition to this article. It can be downloaded at RJ-2021-052.zip
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Kane, "Towards a Grammar for Processing Clinical Trial Data", The R Journal, 2021
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2021-052,
author = {Kane, Michael J.},
title = {Towards a Grammar for Processing Clinical Trial Data},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2021},
note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2021-052},
doi = {10.32614/RJ-2021-052},
volume = {13},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {563-569}
}