Online Program

Return to main conference page
Friday, May 18
Data Science
Data Science Foundations
Fri, May 18, 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Lake Fairfax B
 

A Grammar for Reproducible and Painless Extract-Transform-Load Operations on Medium Data (304456)

*Ben Baumer, Smith College 

Keywords: statistical computing, reproducibility, databases, data wrangling, ETL, data science

Many interesting data sets available on the Internet are of a medium size---too big to fit into a personal computer's memory, but not so large that they won't fit comfortably on its hard disk. In the coming years, data sets of this magnitude will inform vital research in a wide array of application domains. However, due to a variety of constraints they are cumbersome to ingest, wrangle, analyze, and share in a reproducible fashion. These obstructions hamper thorough peer-review and thus disrupt the forward progress of science. We propose a predictable and pipeable hub-and-spoke framework for R (the state-of-the-art statistical computing environment) that leverages SQL (the venerable database architecture and query language) to make reproducible research on medium data a painless reality.