From: Spencer James
Sent: Monday, April 20, 2015 6:33 AM
To: Abraham D. Flaxman
Subject: writing manuscript in Notebook?
Hi Abie,
Hope things are well back in Seattle! I’m about halfway through the Epic Measures book, which has been a great read.. sure is interesting to understand more of the background story.
…
I have another question for you. Do you ever use IPython Notebook to write manuscripts or abstracts? I’ve been trying to figure out a way to work on manuscripts/abstracts such that I have the results/statistics directly embedded into the paper so that I don’t have to continually copy/paste numbers into Word as we go through edits/reviews, ie if I’m reporting an odds ratio, it’d be nice if I could just populate that value in the text itself straight from the logistic regression rather than copy/paste values. I found a few publicly available notebooks where researchers had done something along these lines, but they tended to not be results/data heavy, so I thought I’d see if you had anything like this or know of any better examples.
At any rate, hope all is well — it would be great to hear about what you’re working on these days as well.
Spencer
On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 1:59 PM, Abraham D. Flaxman wrote:
Hi Spencer,
It is always a pleasure to hear from you, and it sounds like you are doing a ton of interesting stuff!
Regarding IPython Notebooks, there is a crowd of hardcore IPython users who want to do exactly what you describe, and they even have collection of successful examples: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interesting-IPython-Notebooks#reproducible-academic-publications
When I last considered doing this, I thought it was promising, but not quite ready. A particular challenge is working with colleagues who like to write collaboratively in MSWord using Track Changes. As a hybrid solution, what I’ve been doing is using python to insert values from calculations into blocks of text and the copy-paste those into Word documents. This saves some of the pain of updating figures after new data comes in, etc, but is less burdensome on people I’m working with who do not prioritize exploring the cutting edge of technology (bleeding edge?).
I’ll make this into a blog, if you don’t mind. Maybe others will be interested, and/or have better ideas.
Here is an example of what my approach might look like:
import jinja2
tmpl = """
Results.
The birth prevalence of moderate and severe CHD in 2010 for males was
{{birth_prev_m}}
per 1,000
(95% Credible Interval [CrI] {{birth_prev_m_lb}}-{{birth_prev_m_ub}}),
and for females was
{{birth_prev_f}}
per 1,000
(95% CrI {{birth_prev_f_lb}}-{{birth_prev_f_ub}}).
From 1968 to 2010, mortality with heart defects (all ages)
declined {{all_mx_decline_pct}}%,
from
{{mx_per_100000_in_1968}}
to
{{mx_per_100000_in_2010}}
per 100 000 person-years (PY);
among zero to 51-week olds,
the decline was
{{u1_mx_decline_pct}}%,
from
{{u1_mx_per_100000_in_1968}}
to
{{u1_mx_per_100000_in_2010}}
per 100 000 PY. The estimated number of adults (age 20 to 65 years)
with moderate to severe CHD in 1968
was
{{adult_cases_1968}} (95% CrI {{adult_cases_1968_lb}}-{{adult_cases_1968_ub}}),
with
{{repro_cases_1968}} (95% CrI {{repro_cases_1968_lb}}-{{repro_cases_1968_ub}})
eproductive age females (age 15-49 years).
In 2010, it was
{{adult_cases_2010}} 95% CrI {{adult_cases_2010_lb}}-{{adult_cases_2010_ub}}),
an increase by a factor of
{{case_increase}} (95% CrI {{case_increase_lb}}-{{case_increase_ub}}),
with
{{repro_cases_2010}} 95% CrI {{repro_cases_2010_lb}}-{{repro_cases_2010_ub}})
reproductive age females.
"""
t = jinja2.Template(tmpl)
print t.render(vals)
with file('achd/achd_abstract_results.txt', 'w') as f:
f.write(t.render(vals))
From: Spencer James
Those are some great examples — the biomed-related ones are especially helpful. Some of my more recent projects involve publicly-available datasets like SEER, and I’d like to start also making that effort to have my analytic code available/reproducible alongside the manuscript itself. The collaboration issue with MS Word is a headache in medicine, too — I like the use of Python to write the text itself as a happy medium, though!
If I can write this next SEER manuscript or abstract using a Notebook, I’ll send it your way, too.
Good hearing from you and I’ll follow up on your blog to see if anyone has some other ideas,
Spencer
Healthy Algorithms 