Tools for analyzing R code the tidy way

With the current emphasis on reproducibility and replicability, there is an increasing need to examine how data analyses are conducted. In order to analyze the between researcher variability in data analysis choices as well as the aspects within the data analysis pipeline that contribute to the variability in results, we have created two R packages: matahari and tidycode. These packages build on methods created for natural language processing; rather than allowing for the processing of natural language, we focus on R code as the substrate of interest. The matahari package facilitates the logging of everything that is typed in the R console or in an R script in a tidy data frame. The tidycode package contains tools to allow for analyzing R calls in a tidy manner. We demonstrate the utility of these packages as well as walk through two examples.


Introduction
With the current emphasis on reproducibility and replicability, there is an increasing need to examine how data analyses are conducted (Goecks et al. 2010;Peng 2011;McNutt 2014;Miguel et al. 2014;Ioannidis et al. 2014;Richard 2014;Leek and Peng 2015;Nosek et al. 2015;Sidi and Harel 2018). In order to accurately replicate a result, the exact methods used for data analysis need to be recorded, including the specific analytic steps taken as well as the software utilized (Waltemath and Wolkenhauer 2016). Studies across multiple disciplines have examined the global set of possible data analyses that can conducted on a specific data set (Silberzhan et al. 2018). While we are able to define this global set, very little is known about the actual variation that exists between researchers. For example, it is possible that the true range of data analysis choices is realistically a much more narrow set than the global sets that are presented. There is a breadth of excellent research and experiments examining how people read visual information (Majumder, Hofmann, and Cook 2013;Loy, Hofmann, and Cook 2017;Wickham, Cook, and Hofmann 2015;Buja et al. 2009;Loy, Follett, and Hofmann 2016), for example the Experiments on Visual Inference detailed here: (http://mamajumder.github.io/html/experiments.html), but not how they actually make analysis choices, specifically analysis coding choices. In addition to not knowing about the "data analysis choice" variability between researchers, we also don't know which portions of the data analysis pipeline result in the most variability in the ultimate research result. We seek to build tools to analyze these two aspects of data analysis: 1. The between researcher variability in data analysis choices 2. The aspects within the data analysis pipeline that contribute to the variability in results Specifically, we have designed a framework to conduct such analyses and created two R packages that allow for the study of data analysis code conducted in R. In addition to answering these crucial questions for broad research fields, we see these tools having additional concrete use cases. These tools will facilitate data science and statistics pedagogy, allowing researchers and instructors to investigate how students are conducting data analyses in the classroom. Alternatively, a researcher could use these tools to examine how collaborators have conducted a data analysis. Finally, these tools could be used in a meta-manner to explore how current software and tools in R are being utilized.

Tidy principles
We specifically employ tidy principles in our proposed packages. Tidy refers to an implementation strategy propagated by Hadley Wickham and implemented by the Tidyverse team at RStudio (Wickham and Grolemund 2016). Here, by tidy we mean our packages adhere to the following principles: Figure 1: A flowchart of a typical analysis that uses matahari and tidycode to analyze and classify R code.
1. Our functions follow the principles outlined in R packages (Wickham 2015) as well as the tidyverse style guide (Wickham 2019). 2. Our output data sets are tidy, as in: • Each variable has its own column.
• Each observation has its own row.
• Each value has its own cell.
By implementing these tidy principles, and thus outputting tidy data frames, we allow for data manipulation and analysis to be conducted using a specific set of tools, such as those included in the tidyverse meta package (Wickham 2017).
Ultimately, we create a mechanism to utilize methods created for natural language processing; here the substrate is code rather than natural language. We model our tools to emulate the tidytext package (Silge andRobinson 2016, 2017); instead of analyzing tokens of text, we are analyzing tokens of code.
We present two packages, matahari, a package for logging everything that is typed in the R console or in an R script, and tidycode, a package with tools to allow for analyzing R calls in a tidy manner. In this paper, we first explain how these packages work. We then demonstrate two examples, one that analyzes data collected from an online experiment, and one that analyzes "old" data via previously created R scripts.

Methods
We have created two R packages, matahari and tidycode. The former is a way to log R code, the latter allows the user to analyze R calls on the function-level in a tidy manner. Figure 1 is a flowchart of the process described in more detail below. This flowchart is adapted from Figure 2.1 in Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach (Silge and Robinson 2017).
We demonstrate how to create these tidy data frames of R code and then emulate the data analysis workflow similar to that put forth in the tidy text literature.

Terminology
In this paper, we refer to R "expressions" or "calls" as well as R "functions" and "arguments". An R call is a combination of an R function with arguments. For example, the following is an R call (Example 1).

Example 1. R call, library
Another example of an R call is the following piped chain of functions from the dplyr package (Example 2). Calls in R are made up of a function or name of a function, and arguments. For example, the call library(tidycode) from Example 1 is comprised of the function library() and the argument tidycode. Example 2 is a bit more complicated. The piped code can be rewritten, as seen in Example 3.

%>% (starwars, select(height, mass))
Example 3. Rewritten piped R call From this example, it is easier to see that the function for this R call is %>% with two arguments, starwars and select(height, mass). Notice that one of these arguments is an R call itself, select(height, mass). matahari matahari is a simple package for logging R code in a tidy manner. It can be installed from CRAN using the following code.

install.packages("matahari")
There are three ways to use the matahari package: 1. Record R code as it is typed and output a tidy data frame of the contents 2. Input a character string of R code and output a tidy data frame of the contents 3. Input an R file containing R code and output a tidy data frame of the contents In the following sections, we will split these into two categories, tidy logging from the R console (1) and tidy logging from an R script (2 and 3).

Tidy logging from the R console
In order to begin logging from the R console, the dance_start() function is used. Logging is paused using dance_stop() and the log can be viewed using dance_tbl(). For example, the following code will result in the the subsequent tidy data frame. Example 4. Logging R code from the R console using matahari The resulting tidy data frame consists of 6 columns: expr, the R call that was run, value, the value that was output, path, if the code was run within RStudio, this will be the path to the file in focus, contents, the file contents of the RStudio editor tab in focus, selection, the text that is highlighted in the RStudio editor tab in focus, and dt, the date and time the expression was run. By default, value, path, contents and selection will not be logged unless the argument is set to TRUE in the dance_start() function. For example, if the analyst wanted the output data frame to include the values computed, they would input dance_start(value = TRUE).
In this particular data frame, there are 6 rows. The first and final rows report the R session information at the time when dance_start() was initiated (row 1) and when dance_stop() was run (row 6). The second row holds the R call dance_start(), the first command run in the R console, was run; the third row holds 1 + 2, the fourth holds here is some text, and the fifth holds sum(1:10). These functions work by saving an invisible data frame called .dance that is referenced by dance_tbl(). Each time dance_start() is subsequently run after dance_stop(), new rows of data are added to this data frame. This invisible data frame exists in a new environment created by the matahari package. We can remove this data frame by running dance_remove().

dance_tbl()[["expr"]]
This data frame can be manipulated using common R techniques. Below, we rerun the same code as above, this time saving the values that are computed in the R console by using the value = TRUE parameter. dance_start(value = TRUE) 1 + 2 "here is some text" sum(1:10) dance_stop() tbl <-dance_tbl() As an example of the type of data wrangling that this tidy format allows for, using dplyr and purrr, we can manipulate this to only examine expressions that result in numeric values.

Tidy logging from an R script
In addition to allowing for the logging of everything typed in the R console, the matahari package also allows for the logging of pre-created R scripts. This can be done using the dance_recital() function, which allows for either a .R file or a character string of R calls as the input. For example, if we have a code file called sample_code.R, we can run dance_recital("sample_code.R") to create a tidy data frame. Alternatively, we can enter code directly as a string of text, such as dance_recital("1 + 2") to create the tidy data frame. Below illustrates this functionality. code_file <system.file("test", "sample_code.R", package = "matahari") dance_recital ( The resulting tidy data frame from dance_recital(), as seen in Examples 5 and 6, is different from that of dance_tbl(). This data frame has 6 columns. The first is the same as the dance_tbl(), expr, the R calls in the .R script or string of code. The subsequent columns are, value, the computed result of the R call, error, which contains the resulting error object from a poorly formed call, output, the printed output from an call, warnings, the contents of any warnings that would be displayed in the console, and messages, the contents of any generated diagnostic messages. Now that we have a tidy data frame with R calls obtained either from the R console or from a .R script, we can analyze them using the tidycode package.

tidycode
The goal of tidycode is to allow users to analyze R scripts, calls, and functions in a tidy way. There are two main tasks that can be achieved with this package: 1. We can "tokenize" R calls 2. We can classify the functions run into one of nine potential data analysis categories: "Setup", "Exploratory", "Data Cleaning", "Modeling", "Evaluation","Visualization", "Communication", "Import", or "Export".
The tidycode package can be installed from CRAN in the following manner. install.packages("tidycode")

library(tidycode)
We can first create a tidy data frame using the matahari package. Alternatively, we can use a function in the tidycode package that wraps the dance_recital() function called read_rfiles(). This function allows you to read in multiple .R files or links to .R files. There are a few example files included in the tidycode package. The paths to these files can be accessed via the tidycode_example() function. For example, running the following code will give the file path for the example_analysis.R file.
We can then use the unnest_calls() function to create a data frame of the calls, splitting each into the individual functions and arguments. We liken this to the tidytext unnest_tokens() function. This function has two parameters, .data, the data frame that contains the R calls, and input the name of the column that contains the R calls. In this case, the data frame is m and the input column is expr. This results is a tidy data frame with two additional columns: func the name of the function called and args the arguments of the function called. Because this function takes a data frame as the first argument, it works nicely with the tidyverse data manipulation packages. For example, we could get the same data frame as above by using the following code. The get_classifications() function calls a classification data frame that we curated that classifies the individual functions into one of nine categories: setup, exploratory, data cleaning, modeling, evaluation, visualization, communication, import, or export. This can also be merged into the data frame. There are two lexicons for classification, crowdsource and leeklab. The former was created by volunteers who classified R code using the classify shiny application. The latter was curated by Jeff Leek's Lab. To select a particular lexicon, you can specify the lexicon parameter. For example, the following code will merge in the crowdsource lexicon only. In text analysis, there is the concept of "stopwords". These are often small common filler words you want to remove before completing an analysis, such as "a" or "the". In a tidy code analysis, we can use a similar concept to remove some functions. For example we may want to remove the assignment operator, <-, before completing an analysis. We have compiled a list of common stop functions in the get_stopfuncs() function to anti join from the data frame.

Online experiment: P-hack-athon
This first example demonstrates how to use the matahari and tidycode packages to analyze data from a prospective study, using the "recording" capabilities of the matahari package to capture the code as participants run it. Recently, we launched a "p-hack-athon" where we encouraged users to analyze a dataset with the goal of producing the smallest p-value (IRB # IRB00008885, Not Human Subjects Research Classification, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health IRB). We captured the code the participants ran using the dance_start() and dance_stop() functions from the matahari package. This resulted in a tidy data frame of R calls for each participant. We use the tidycode package to analyze these matahari data frames.

library(tidyverse) library(tidycode)
## load the dataset, called df load("data/df_phackathon.Rda") The data from the "p-hack-a-thon" is saved as a data frame called df. We have bound the expr column from the matahari data frame for each participant. Using the unnest_calls() function, we unnest each of these R calls into a function and it's arguments.

tbl <-df %>% unnest_calls(expr)
We can then remove the "stop functions" by doing an anti join with the get_stopfuncs() function and merge in the crowd-sourced classifications with the get_classifications() function.

Classifications
We can use common data manipulation functions from dplyr. For example, on average, "data cleaning" functions made up 39.6% of the functions run by participants (Table 1).

Static Analysis
This second example demonstrates how to use the matahari and tidycode packages to analyze data from a retrospective study, or static R scripts. Here, we use the read_rfiles() function from the tidycode package. This wraps the dance_recital() matahari function and allows for multiple file paths or urls to be read, resulting in a tidy data frame. As an example, we are going to scrape all of the .R files from two of the most widely used data manipulation packages, the data.table package (Dowle and Srinivasan 2019) and the dplyr package. We are going to use the gh package (Bryan and Wickham 2017) to scrape these files from GitHub.

Setup
We access the files via GitHub using the gh() function from the gh package. This gives a list of download urls that can be passed to the read_rfiles() function from the tidycode package.

Data Cleaning
We can combine these two tidy data frames. We will do some small data manipulation, removing R calls that were either NULL or character. For example, in the dplyr package some .R files just reference data frames as a character string.

Analyze R functions
Now we can use the tidycode unnest_calls() function to create a tidy data frame of the individual functions along with the arguments used to create both packages. Notice here we are not performing an anti join on "stop functions". For this analysis, we are interested in examining some key differences in the commonly used functions contained the two packages. Common operators may actually be of interest, so we do not want to drop them from the data frame. We can count the functions by package. Using this data frame, we can visualize which functions are most commonly called in each package.

Discussion
We have designed a framework to analyze the data analysis pipeline and created two R packages that allow for the study of data analysis code conducted in R. We present two packages, matahari, a package for logging everything that is typed in the R console or in an R script, and tidycode, a package with tools to allow for analyzing R calls in a tidy manner. These tools can be applied both to prospective studies, where a researcher can intentionally record code typed by participants, and retrospectively, where the researcher can retrospectively analyze code. We believe that these tools will help shape the next phase of reproducibility and replicability, allowing the analysis of code to inform data science pedagogy, examine how collaborates conduct data analyses, and explore how current software tools are being utilized.