Reproducible Research with R and Sweave

My glamorous day (and often, night) job is working on finding the genes which cause Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) and in a separate project, determining how arteriovenous malformations (AVM) in the brain occur. Being able to reproduce the research that I've conducted in the past is of critical importance, especially when dealing with millions of datapoints in projects spread over years.

The utilization of tools such as R and Sweave, which enable the production of publication-quality plots, tables, and even text in articles that are tied to the raw data (using make), allows researches such as myself to be able to replicate an analysis in the future, and know precisely where we've found mistakes. In this talk, the basics of R and Sweave will be presented, as well as a set of examples, ranging from simple to relatively complex.