DeclareDesign: A Tidyverse-First Research Design Declaration and Diagnosis Tool

Declares, simulates, diagnoses and redesigns research designs. A design is declared as a model, an inquiry, a data strategy and an answer strategy, then simulated with purrr and diagnosed with dplyr. Version 2.0 is a ground-up rewrite of the package on tidyverse conventions.

Details

A design is a sequence of steps combined with +. Each step is one of the four elements of a research design:

• declare_model() describes the world the design runs in.

• declare_inquiry() records the question. Its value on a draw is the estimand.

• declare_sampling(), declare_assignment(), and declare_measurement() make up the data strategy: who is observed, what they are assigned, and what is measured.

• declare_estimator() and declare_test() are the answer strategy.

diagnose_design() simulates a design many times and reports how its estimates compare to its estimands: bias, power, coverage, and the rest. redesign() changes a parameter and returns a new design, so two versions can be compared before any data are collected.

design <-
  declare_model(N = 100, U = rnorm(N), Y_Z_0 = U, Y_Z_1 = U + 0.5) +
  declare_inquiry(ATE = mean(Y_Z_1 - Y_Z_0)) +
  declare_assignment(Z = sample(rep(0:1, length.out = N))) +
  declare_measurement(Y = Y_Z_0 * (1 - Z) + Y_Z_1 * Z) +
  declare_estimator(Y ~ Z, .method = lm, term = "Z", inquiry = "ATE")

diagnose_design(design)

See also

Useful links:

• https://declaredesign.org/r/declaredesign/

• https://github.com/DeclareDesign/DeclareDesign

• Report bugs at https://github.com/DeclareDesign/DeclareDesign/issues

Author

Maintainer: Alexander Coppock acoppock@gmail.com (ORCID)

Authors:

• Alexander Coppock acoppock@gmail.com (ORCID)

• Graeme Blair graeme.blair@gmail.com (ORCID)

• Jasper Cooper jaspercooper@gmail.com (ORCID)

• Macartan Humphreys macartan@gmail.com (ORCID)

• Neal Fultz nfultz@gmail.com