We think this is an interesting paper for anyone who wants to learn to build an API with the R package plumber. This is a novel method in health economics, but we believe will help improve the transparency of modelling methods in our field.
The direct numerical simulations (DNS) for this paper were conducted using Basilisk (http://basilisk.fr/). As Basilisk is a free software program written in C, it can be readily installed on any Linux machine, and it should be straightforward to then run the driver code to re-produce the DNS from this paper. Given this, the numerical solutions presented in this paper are a result of many high-fidelity simulations, which each took approximately 24 CPU hours running between 4 to 8 cores. Hence the difficulty in reproducing the results should mainly be in the amount of computational resources it would take, so HPC resources will be required. The DNS in this paper were used to validate the presented analytical solutions, as well as extend the results to a longer timescale. Reproducing these numerical results will build confidence in these results, ensuring that they are independent of the system architecture they were produced on.
If all went right, the analysis should be fully reproducible without the need to make any adjustments. The paper aims to find optimal locations for new parkruns, but we were not 100% sure how 'optimal' should be defined. We provide a few examples, but the code was meant to be flexible enough to allow potential decision makers to specify their own, alternative objectives. The spatial data set is also quite interesting and fun to play around with. Cave: The full analysis takes a while to run (~30+ min) and might require >= 8gb ram.
The focus of the project is reproducibility. Here we show the differences to access data compared to similar initiatives: https://ropensci.org/blog/2019/05/09/tradestatistics/. Also, similar projects have obscure parts, while our exposes the code from raw data downloading to dashboard creation.
It uses the drake R package that should make reproducibility of R projects much easier (just run make.R and you're done). However, it does depend on very specific package versions, which are provided by the accompanying docker image.
