Towards a Grammar for Processing Clinical Trial Data

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to help define a path toward a grammar for processing clinical trials by a) defining a format in which we would like to represent data from standardized clinical trial data b) describing a standard set of operations to transform clinical trial data into this format, and c) to identify a set of verbs and other functionality to facilitate data processing and encourage reproducibility in the processing of these data. It provides a background on standard clinical trial data and goes through a simple preprocessing example illustrating the value of the proposed approach through the use of the forceps package, which is currently being used for data of this kind.