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Friday, June 5
Practice and Applications
Practice and Applications Posters, Part 2
Fri, Jun 5, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
TBD
 

Solving Data Science Problems in the US Federal Government with R Shiny (308485)

*Samantha Tyner, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 

Keywords: shiny, government, survey

In the last two years, the R package shiny has averaged well over 10,000 downloads per day from the Comprehensive R Archive Network. The increasingly popular tool for creating interactive data applications in R is also being used more in government applications. Shiny is an attractive alternative to other tools such as Tableau due to its low relative cost. However, because R and shiny are open-source, there are security and data disclosure concerns when applying the software to government data. Due to the decentralized nature of federal agencies in the U.S., it is difficult to understand how software is applied across the government. In this talk, we will present results of a survey of shiny users in the U.S. federal government. The survey instrument captures the process of developing an application in shiny, from data acquisition to deployment. The survey also collects information about the processes underlying approval and development, including U.S. laws such as the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act. The goals of this study are to document the process of using shiny and to understand how and why shiny is used in the U.S federal government.