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DataSHIELD Release Notes v6.2
Focus of Release
The changes in the v6.2 release of DataSHIELD are mainly focuses on the enhancing of disclosure controls available to data owners, also additional analytical and presentation methods for data analysis.
Changes from DataSHIELD v6.1.1 to v6.2
Checking Permissive PrivacyControlLevel
To support data owners who have particularly sensitive data, additional disclosure protection has been added to v6.2 release. These changes permit a data owner to place a service into "Permissive" (default) or "non-Permissive" disclosure mode. This is done by setting the “datashield.privacyControlLevel” option. The service will be in "permissive" mode if the “datashield.privacyControlLevel” option has the value "permissive", any other value will cause the service to be in "non-permissive" mode.
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Not having access to these methods will mean that the Data Owner will be required to perform more data shaping for the Data User(s).
Changing disclosure settings
In this release, there are new disclosure settings data owners can specify. The new “default.nfilter.levels.density” and “default.nfilter.levels.max” has been added, with default level equal to 0.33 and 40 respectively. These options are described on the page wiki page - https://data2knowledge.atlassian.net/wiki/x/DoCaKg
New Functions
The following functions have been added to the version 6.2 of DataSHIELD dsBaseClient package.
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(*) Provided by Xavier Escribà Montagut, Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal), Spain
Changed Functions
ds.replaceNA: This new version of ds.replaceNA can replace NAs in factor variables. The replaced values are then considered as additional levels of the factor.
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ds.asNumeric: has been changed to deal with different types of variables (including characters)
Client-side Testing Infrastructure
Additional tests, and general test improvements are included in this release.
Addition of testing within client methods of existence of variable and class being used.
Server-side Testing Infrastructure
Additional tests, general test improvements, added privacy control level tests and improved error messages are included in this release.
Backward compatibility with v6.1.1 dsBaseClient
There are no known significant issues with using v6.1.1 dsBaseClient with v6.2 dsBase. The changed in behaviour which have been observed are limited to changes to the text of error messages, changes to the circumstances under which a disclosure block could occur and bug fixes.
Supported Versions
DataSHIELD v6.2 is supported on R3.5, R3.6, R 4.0 and R4.1, and would be expected to work with intermediate versions. At present the DataSHIELD client-side package is known to work on Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Windows 10 and macOS Big Sur (11.6). DataSHIELD server-side package is known to work when deployed to Opal 4.3.3 running on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.
Code Availability
As ever, you can obtain the code at a variety of places:
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