R Package Management at Roche
Summary:
In this session, we will be looking at various learnings obtained from creating a corporate R infrastructure and developing R packages to address the unique business problems presented by clinical trials.
Architecting and maintaining an R installation across a large organization can be challenging. How do you balance between giving individual users the ability to meet their specific needs, but also providing a standardized environment which meets regulatory requirements? As R needs to expand, then internal packages also get created, and these also need to be managed.
It is often useful to create custom R packages to complement the community R packages. We are developing both open and closed source packages that we validate and deploy on our R infrastructure. We will be discussing some learnings from the NEST software development team including: project management, automation, DevOps, testing, integration, releasing, validation, and deployment of the in-house built R packages. We will also be presenting steps we took towards simplifying the development process to enable co-creation and collaboration with internal and external developers.
Finally, we will split into break-out rooms to discuss some relevant topics on how to package creation and management can be dealt with effectively.
Main Sections
0:00 Introduction
1:10 Overview
4:17 R Package at Roche
06:38 Journey of corporate infrastructure and R tools development
24:11 NEST software development Example
43:18 Next steps in simplifying development and enabling co-creation & collaboration
1:01:14 End of presentation
Kieran Martin, has a background in statistics and has a Ph.D. in experimental design from the University of Southampton. He has been using R for over a decade and has always advocated for its expanded usage as a tool for data science. He has been at Roche for 6 years, working on a variety of different molecules and projects, most recently he has become the R Enablement Lead for Product Development Data Sciences; his role is to promote the usage of R and influence how it is utilized.
Tadeusz Lewandowski joined Roche in 2008 and he is currently a Pan-Pharma collaboration product lead. Tadeusz holds dual master’s degrees from the universities in Poland. He received his MSc in Economics from Poznan University of Economics, and MSc in Engineering (Electronics and Telecommunications). In 2016, Tadeusz was appointed to establish the Statistical Programming Analyst – Data Analytics Oncology group. In 2019 Tadeusz co-initiated the NEST project at Roche. NEST is a software development project for creating R-based tools to analyze clinical trial data for exploratory and regulatory use.
Adrian Waddell joined Roche in 2016 and he is currently part of the Data Science Acceleration group. Adrian holds a Ph.D. in Statistics with a focus on interactive data visualization and exploration from the University of Waterloo, Canada, and a bachelor’s degree in data analysis and process design from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. In 2019 Adrian co-initiated the NEST project at Roche and he is currently the technical lead. NEST is a software development project for creating R-based tools to analyze clinical trial data for exploratory and regulatory use.
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