PEP-T4.
Introductory R programming with the ‘radsafer’ package MG Hogue*, SRNS
Abstract: Health physicists routinely perform computations, but many of us lack tools that help keep these computations accurate and transparent. Some even resort to – gasp – spreadsheets. In this PEP session, you learn how to quickly get started with R programming, using the radsafer package.
The radsafer package provides easy-to-use functions in the following categories: radiation measurements, decay corrections, accessing radionuclide data, and tools for MCNP. (The MCNP tools will be reserved to the end of the class since they are of interest only to MCNP analysts.)
R can be challenging to learn if starting from scratch. But starting with a package -- a documented set of shared code and data designed for your work -- makes the transition easier. All software in this course is free and open-source.
The class will start with a brief overview of R and Rstudio. Attendees will perform simple computations in the Rstudio console, then run the same computations from the Rstudio source panel. This will transition to writing and saving work as scripts. A brief look at function writing will provide the user insight into the best way to use the functions provided in radsafer. Next, we will explore the radsafer package and try out functions on realistic examples.
Many radsafer functions access the RadData package. RadData contains the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) Publication 107, Nuclear Decay Data for Dosimetric Calculations – one of the data sets used by ORNL’s Radiological Toolbox.
More details on the packages are provided at https://github.com/markhogue/radsafer and https://github.com/markhogue/RadData.
Attendees are encouraged to bring laptops, with any common operating system, loaded with the latest versions of R and Rstudio. Installing radsafer (through the Package menu in Rstudio) automatically installs all needed packages such as RadData. Loading R and RStudio is very straight-forward. If desired, a set of instructions to load the programs is located at: http://www.sthda.com/english/wiki/installing-r-and-rstudio-easy-r-programming.
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