The nice thing about working on a team with other analysts, working as part of a research group, or working on your PhD is the ability to share analysis with other colleagues, get feedback, and learn new ways of thinking about things.
Interestingly, when I’ve inquired to colleagues at some teams about how they share their analysis with their group they often say that, “people do their analysis and just present the results”. I think this is a big miss in terms of being able to have transparency in the research process, sharing so that others can learn or help to provide constructive feedback, and walking through the steps you went through (data retrieval, data cleaning, analysis, model testing, etc) to ensure that things make sense to the group before being shared with the end user.
For the PhD student, a more streamlined approach to the entire analysis can help them talk through what they did with their advisors, ensure that all the correct steps were taken during the analysis, and have greater confidence about what their data is and is not saying (which can really come in handy when it is time to defend the thesis!). When I was doing my PhD I would often try and put all my steps into a power point presentation to walk through with my supervisors. I never liked that, however, because it always felt clumsy and I was never really getting to the guts of the analysis as much as I was just sharing the outcomes of what I did and why I did it and talking through how I did it. A template that allows for a clear presentation would have made things much easier for both myself and my supervisors
In my last post, I used R Markdown to create a report that allows the sport scientist to share some basic data analysis with the strength and conditioning staff and other coaches. As I said in that post, R Markdown is a wonderful resource for creating reports where you can hide your code and simply show visualizations of the data and model outputs. But, what if we don’t want to hide our code?! In this sense, R Markdown is extremely useful for setting up a data analysis template to allow you to walk through all the steps in your project and share the results with your colleagues or PhD supervisors. Additionally, you could also keep R Studio open when presenting your findings and address any changes/suggestions that people may have, in real time before, “knitting” the markdown file into the final html or pdf document. This last part allows the analysis to come to life and allows you to make direct changes and immediately show how they impact the outcome of the analysis!
Data Analysis Templates
There are a number of different data analysis frameworks one could follow. Two that immediately come to mind are the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) and the Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis, and Conclusion (PPDAC) Cycle.
Although they come from different industries — CRSIP-DM from the business world and PPDAC from more of the statistics education world — there is considerable overlap and both have the aim of providing the analyst with a clear path to answering their research question.
The objectives of each phase within these two frameworks is shown below.
As you can see, the end goal of the analysis is different between the two frameworks: CRISP-DM being targeted at deploying a model specific to business use cases and PPDAC providing more of a runway for scientific publication. However, both can provide us with an appreciation for creating a systematic process around data analysis, allowing for a clear explanation of our approach when discussing with colleagues or PhD supervisors.
In an attempt to create something more generic and less specific to a certain industry or field, I came up with my own framework:
The framework is freely available on my GitHub page in both an R Markdown and Jupyter Notebook (if you prefer Python) formats. If you’d like to see with the R Markdown HTML looks like, click here >> PWard_-_Data_Analysis_Framework.
All you have to do is take the template (either R Markdown or Jupyter Notebook), delete the comments that I have under each section and fill in your own comments and your R or Python script, where applicable, to conduct your analysis. Once complete, you will have a clean looking file that details your entire approach.
I’ve made a simple example of what using the template could look like. If you are interested in seeing the result in R Markdown, CLICK HERE >> Data_Analysis_Framework_Example_–_MLB_Hitting. If you are interested in seeing the result in a Python Jupyter Notebook, CLICK HERE >> Data Analysis Framework Example — MLB Hitting (Jupyter).
All of the code and the templates for use are available on my GitHub page.