Welcome to the Analyst Guide of the wpa R package. This document will guide you through the installation process, explain the package functionality and structure, and get you comfortable with some common functions for analysis.
Make sure you have:
- Analyst access to Workplace Analytics
- R installed in your local device.
An IDE is optional, but we recommend either RStudio Desktop or VS Code.
There are multiple reasons:
- Cutting edge data science: R is an open-source language that is known for its active user community and a wide range of packages that together enable the quick and effective implementation of data science techniques.
- Reproducibility: Code-based workflows help facilitate reproducible analysis, which is the notion that analysis should be built in a way that is replicable by others. R as a tool promotes this good practice.
- Efficiency / scalability: R scales relatively well in the context of large datasets. The application of functions and automated processes also help cut down routine analysis time
- Integration: If you already use R as part of your analysis toolkit, adopting this package as part of the workflow will be seamless and easy
- Extensibility: One of the most appealing feature of R is the access it offers to a wide range of packages. For instance, clustering and text mining can be done very easily as part of a R workflow – which are both available in this package
This guide is organized in five key sections:
- Getting Started: This section contains the detailed installation instructions, and a general overview of how functions work.
- Summary Functions: This section introduces functions that calculate averages and draw comparisons across groups.
- Distribution Functions: This section describes functions that help you explore distributions across groups.
- Trend Functions: This section explains functions that explore time dyanmics across a wide range of metrics.
- Network Functions: This section explores functions that help you plot and analyse networks.
To get the most out of wpa, make sure to leaverage these additional resources:
- Our official wpa cheat sheet.
- A growing list of articles with detailed walkthroughs, written by multiple contributors.
Let's begin with the Getting Started section.