StatAid: An R package with a graphical user interface for data analysis
Vincent Alcazer
Abstract
Data analysis is a crucial step in every research project in life science. Every clinician or researcher is one day faced with the need to perform statistical analysis. However, few free accessible solutions exist to date and most of the relevant software programs need a paid license. R is a free language which allows one to perform statistical analysis (R Core Team, 2017). While the R environment is very powerful, its learning curve can be very steep in the beginning, especially for people with no previous coding skills or those with less time to learn them. A graphical user interface has already been provided as an independent package, but its features are limited for medical and applied life science studies and its usage remains difficult and unintuitive for new users (Fox, 2005). Other free software programs exist, such as iNZight or Jamovi. However, while providing solutions with multiple features such as variable recoding, they do not guide the user through the analysis and can lack some key features such as time-dependent outcome analysis.