Draft DataSHIELD Release Notes v6.2

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ds.tapply.assign: Major refactoring which ensures that variables are present in all servers - Check with Demetris. fixed an issue to deal correctly with variables that include missing values and not only complete cases.

ds.tapply: Major refactoring which ensures that variables are present in all servers - Check with Demetris, fixed a issue to deal correctly with variables that include missing values and not only complete cases.

ds.mean: the behavior if all values are NAs has been changed; if ds.mean is call on a vector, on a server, which only contains NAs, the result from the server will be NA, instead of causing a disclosure block.

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ds.corTest: The new version allows the user to get Kendall’s tau or Spearman’s rho correlation coefficient for a pair of variables, in addition to the existing Pearson’s correlation. The new arguments added are: the method which can be one of "pearson" (default), "kendall", or "spearman", the exact which is a logical indicating whether an exact p-value should be computed for Kendall’s tau or Spearman’s rho, the conf.level which defines the level of the returned confidence interval, and the type which defines if a study-specific correlation coefficient is returned or a combined correlation across all studies (the combined correlation is an approximation of the exact pooled correlation and is estimated based on Fisher's z transformation).

ds.glmSLMA, ds.lmerSLMA and ds.glmerSLMA: the changes to these functions are as follows:

• we made sure that the grouping factor (i.e. the variable after the "|") in the mixed model is not included in a set of checks that are normally used for standard GLMs. This is not appropriate as it blocked users from running models when there were small number of individuals in the groups (e.g. siblings in family groups). Having a small number of individuals in a group is not a disclosure issue for mixed models and hence it should be permitted.

• we improved the handling of errors when something went wrong in the underlying lme4 functions that are used. Previously this meant that the error message returned to the user was not the one from the underlying function, making it hard to debug what has gone wrong.

• we have added, to ds.glmSLMA, a notify.of.progress argument which can enable or disable logging to progress

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ds.histogram: function allows the user to plot distinct histograms (one for each study) or a combined histogram that merges the single plots.

ds.Boole: an issue was fixed which means that under certain circumstances incorrect results can be produced. This incorrect behaviour can occur if the right-hand operand is negative.

ds.asNumeric: has been changed to deal with different types of variables (including characters)

Client-side Testing Infrastructure

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