Scottish Government R User Day 2023
Wednesday, 6 December 2023
The R User Day will take place on Wednesday, 6 December 2023. The event will be online only and is open to public sector analysts.
To attend the event, please sign up using the registration form. Please make sure to register using your work email address.
We intend to record talks with a view to making them available on Pathways so that they are available for future use. Participants should read the following privacy notice before attending the event (click the blue banner to expand).
By joining the online event, the participant agrees to the following terms and conditions:
The event is being run by the Office of the Chief Statistician and Data Division in the Scottish Government. The event will highlight good practice and promote the use of R open source software with analysts in the Scottish Government and the Scottish public sector.
The presentation part of this event will be recorded so that those who cannot attend it live, can watch it later or attendees can revisit. The recording will be stopped before the Q&A session at the end of each presentation takes place. The presenter will inform attendees once the recording has stopped.
The recording will be held securely by the Office of Chief Statistician and Data Division and is processed under the lawful basis – legitimate interest. These will be excellent reference materials for analysts who would like to refer back to the content of the talks and the recordings will also be of use to those who were unable to attend the events. If you do not wish to be recorded during the presentation, we recommend that your camera and microphone are switched off.
Once the recording has stopped, the event will open to questions where participants can freely ask questions via discussion or within the chat function. This part of the event will not be recorded.
We intend to host the recordings on Pathways and may share it with other public sector organisations.
We will retain the recordings for 5 years. These recordings will be of great interest to analysts in the Scottish Government for the foreseeable future.
If you have any concerns about the information within this privacy notice, please contact Gerry Scullion.
Presentation slides and materials are available in the presentations section of this page.
Please email the organisers if you have any questions or have any accessibility requirements.
Agenda
| Time | Title | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 10:00 – 10:10 | Opening remarks | |
| 10:10 – 10:30 | Introduction | Ally McAlpine, Chief Statistician |
| 10:30 – 10:50 | Moving a SAS project to R | Jay Ware |
| 10:50 – 11:10 | Say goodbye to semi-colons: moving the June Agricultural Census from SAS to R | Lucy Nevard |
| 11:10 – 11:20 | Break | |
| 11:20 – 11:40 | Road casualties map | Ivet Gazova |
| 11:40 – 12:00 | Automating disclosure control in R | Eoin Ó Laighléis and Laura Stott |
| 12:00 – 13:10 | Lunch | |
| 13:10 – 13:30 | Five practical ways to improve your R project | Alice Byers |
| 13:30 – 13:50 | Incorporating sgplot in the development of Official Statistics publications | Joshua Bird |
| 13:50 – 14:10 | Update on analytical workbench and ADM systems | Sandy Smith |
| 14:10 - 14:30 | Creating reactive charts with Highcharter in R | Sam Hunter |
| 14:30 – 14:50 | R Shiny: Disease prevalence in Primary Care | Julia Moeller |
| 14:50 – 15:00 | Closing remarks |
Presentations
Moving a SAS project to R
Speaker: Jay Ware, Scottish Government
Planning and managing the migration to R of a large SAS project used in producing Supply-Use Tables.
Say goodbye to semi-colons: moving the June Agricultural Census from SAS to R
Speaker: Lucy Nevard, Scottish Government
The process (still ongoing) of translating the complex legacy SAS code for the June Agricultural Census into R, including the improvements made, the many challenges and the lessons learned.
Road casualties map
Speaker: Ivet Gazova, Transport Scotland
Creating a reproducible analytical pipeline using Leaflet to produce a map showing where these collisions happen, with filtering based on the mode of the user.
Automating disclosure control in R
Speakers: Eoin Ó Laighléis and Laura Stott, Scottish Government
A demo of the automatic suppression code used in everyday work. Looking for suggestions to improve this, package it and make it available to the wider analytical profession.
Five practical ways to improve your R project
Speaker: Alice Byers, Scottish Government
Do you find it difficult knowing where to start to improve your R code? This talk will cover five practical examples of improvements you can make to your R project, or things to consider when writing new R code.
Incorporating sgplot in the development of Official Statistics publications
Speaker: Joshua Bird, Scottish Government
A case study to transform a standard government report into an accessible Official Statistics publication. Using sgplot, a new R package which extends the language of ggplot2 for Scottish Government, this ensured it adhered to vis best practice.
Update on analytical workbench and ADM systems
Speaker: Sandy Smith, Scottish Government
Creating reactive charts with Highcharter in R
Speaker: Sam Hunter, National Records of Scotland
See how Scotland’s Census used Highcharts to produce accessible and reactive charts for the outputs website.
R Shiny: Disease prevalence in Primary Care
Speaker: Julia Moeller, Public Health Scotland
The process of building a Shiny dashboard showing disease prevalence in general practices in Scotland. A pilot approach to dashboard building in the public sector.