The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by dogado GmbH, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider. Check out our Wordpress Tutorial.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]dogado.de.

DeclareDesign

DeclareDesign declares, diagnoses, and redesigns research designs. A design is written as four parts, a model of the world, an inquiry about it, a data strategy, and an answer strategy, joined with +; diagnose_design() then simulates it and reports bias, power, coverage, and whatever else you ask for, before any data are collected.

library(DeclareDesign)

design <-
  declare_model(N = 100, U = rnorm(N), potential_outcomes(Y ~ 0.2 * Z + U)) +
  declare_inquiry(ATE = mean(Y_Z_1 - Y_Z_0)) +
  declare_assignment(Z = complete_ra(N)) +
  declare_measurement(Y = reveal_outcomes(Y ~ Z)) +
  declare_estimator(Y ~ Z, .method = difference_in_means, inquiry = "ATE")

diagnose_design(design)
#> Research design diagnosis
#>   500 simulations
#>   bootstrap standard errors in parentheses (100 replicates)
#>
#>  Design Inquiry Estimator Outcome Term N Sims Mean Estimand Mean Estimate
#>  design     ATE estimator       Y    Z    500          0.20          0.20
#>                                                      (0.00)        (0.01)
#>    Bias SD Estimate   RMSE  Power Coverage
#>    0.00        0.20   0.20   0.17     0.96
#>  (0.01)      (0.01) (0.01) (0.02)   (0.01)

library(DeclareDesign) also attaches the three companion packages that supply the pieces: fabricatr makes data, randomizr randomizes, and estimatr estimates. The book Research Design in the Social Sciences (Blair, Coppock, and Humphreys) works through all of it at https://book.declaredesign.org.

Installing

Install from CRAN, which brings fabricatr, randomizr, and estimatr 2.0 with it:

install.packages("DeclareDesign")

The development version is on GitHub:

remotes::install_github("DeclareDesign/DeclareDesign")

What changed in 2.0

2.0 is a ground-up rewrite on tidyverse foundations. The declaration syntax is unchanged, and the book’s designs run as written. What changed:

• redesign() reaches a name the design reads (a value named above the design, a designer’s argument, or declare_parameters()), and errors, with the fix, on a number written inside a step.
• declare_parameters() and declare_notes() name what a design can be set to and what it works out.
• A design is a value: it carries the objects it reads, so it survives saveRDS() and travels to parallel workers. A seeded run gives the same numbers sequentially and under future::plan(multisession).
• Step-level draws hold a population fixed while the assignment is redrawn, and the diagnosis decomposes variance by step.
• An estimator that fails on one draw is recorded rather than fatal.
• inquiry = takes the inquiry’s label; make_groups is group_by(); print_code() and compare_designs() are gone.

The changelog has the full list, and vignette("declaredesign2.0") the reasoning, the speed measurements, and a grep table for porting a script. vignette("getting-started") is the short introduction.

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.