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Peter E. DeWitt

I am a Ph.D. Biostatistician.

    Minding Broken Clocks

    A Blog.

  1. Installing Package Dependencies without external http(s) requests

    Consider you have a server that is running behind a firewall and, for security reasons, cannot make external http(s) requests. Further, you have R running on this server and you need to install a set of packages. The simple approach of Read more …

    • on R programming package development

  2. Strother Walker Award

    The faculty of the Department of Biostatistics and Informatics has awarded me the 2017 Strother Walker Award based on outstanding work on your dissertation, and your many contributions to computational work being done by your fellow classmates. Read more …

    • on awards

  3. Ph.D. Dissertation Defended

    I have successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation: “Parsimonious B-Spline Regression Models via Control Polygon and Control Net Reduction for Identifying Factors Explaining Variation in Daily Hormone Profiles During The Menopausal Transition.” Read more …

    • on phd

  4. git diff pdfs

    Binary files and git repositories can be a pain, especially when looking at the git diff output. Here are two helpful things to do with git to make working with .pdfs less painful. Read more …

    • on git

  5. 10th International Conference on Health Informatics

    I presented a paper at the 10th International Conference on Health Informatics in Porto Portugal, Feb 21-23, 2017. HealthInf is part of BIOSTEC. Read more …

    • on abstract conferences

  6. (lazy)Loading Cached Chunks into an Interactive R Session

    If you cache code chunks when using knitr to generate reproducible documents then you’ve likely had the issue arrise of needing to load the results of cached chunks into an active interactive R session. The functions lazyload_cache_dir and lazyload_cache_labels have been added to the developmental version of qwraps2 to make loading cached objects into an interactive R session easy. Read more …

    • on R knitr cache qwraps2

  7. Baseline Characteristics Tables with qwraps2

    Almost every biomedical research paper requires a “Table 1: baseline patient characteristics.” Many developers have published tools to help streamline the construction of such tables. The qwraps2::summary_table function is my contribution to the toolbox. Read more …

    • on R data summaries qwraps2

  8. Secondary Axis in ggplot2 v2.2.0

    The recent release of Hadley Whickham’s ggplot2 version 2.2.0 included several new features. Notably Read more …

    • on R programming ggplot2 phd

  9. Updating Call Arguments

    The stats::update function is one of my favorite tools in R. Using this function saves a lot of time and effort when needing to modify an object. However, this function has its limits. The following is an example of how to extend the use of stats::update. Read more …

    • on R programming

  10. dewittpe.github.io Set up

    I’ve spent the last several hours of yesterday this early morning putting the initial dewittpe.github.io page together. I hope you, the wandering web surfer, or the unfortunately sentient web spider, enjoy what you have found. Read more …

    • on general