DataSHIELD Release Notes v6.1

Focus of Release

The major focuses of the v6.1 release of DataSHIELD, is adding new analytical and presentation functions.

Changes from DataSHIELD v6.0.1 to v6.1

New Analytical Functions

The following functions have been added to the suite of analytical functions provided by DataSHIELD.

ds.glmPredict: causes the application of predict.glm to a server-side glm object
ds.glmSummary: causes the summarization of a server-side glm object
ds.kurtosis: calculates the kurtosis of a numeric variable with three different mathematical formulas
ds.skewness: calculates the skewness of a numeric variable with three different mathematical formulas

ds.getWGSR: computes the WHO Growth Reference z-scores of anthropometric data
ds.abs: computes the absolute values of an input numeric or integer variable
ds.sqrt: computes the square root values of an input numeric or integer variable

New Presentation Functions

ds.boxPlot: draws boxplot based on data on the study servers (*)

(*) Provided by Xavier Escribà Montagut, Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal), Spain

Changed Functions

The following functions have been modified in this release of DataSHIELD.

ds.dataFrameSubset: contains additional argument checking
ds.glmSLMA: improved documents

ds.cbind: simplified, some arguments have been removed
ds.scatterPlot: the logical argument “return.coords” (default to FALSE) added, to allow users select if the coordinates of the anonymised data points should be returned back to the Console. If the user selects to get the coordinates on the console, he/she can then use any of the native R graphical libraries (e.g. ggplot, etc.) to generate other visualisations on the client-side

Client-side Testing Infrastructure

Added support for running tests which require ds.dangerClient functions as part of the Continuous Integration tests.

Additional tests, and general test improvements are included in this release.

Server-side Testing Infrastructure

Added test suite to directly tests of the server functions. These tests have also been integrated with Continuous Integration.

Generate of test coverage reports from server test suite.

Supported Versions

DataSHIELD v6.1 is supported on R3.5, R3.6 and R 4.0, and would be expected to work with intermediate versions. At present the DataSHIELD client-side package is known to work on Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10. DataSHIELD server-side package is known to work when deployed to Opal 3.0.3 running on Ubuntu 16.04.

Code Availability

As ever, you can see the code at a variety of places: https://cran.obiba.org/, https://github.com/datashield/dsBase/tree/6.1 and https://github.com/datashield/dsBaseClient/tree/6.1