Appendix B — Changes

B.1 Important changes with version 0.53

B.1.1 Single-case studies with cases of varying phase design

Sometimes it is necessary to combine single-cases with different phase-designs into one single-case study (for instance when some cases include an extension phase and others do not). Various functions in scan now can handle such a data structure.

B.1.2 Piping

The concept of piping is great for writing clean and intelligible code that is easier to debug. We imported the pipe function %>% from the magrittr package. Since version 4.1, R has its own pipe operator implementation |>. This is great and works fine with the scan package. But since the |> Operator is not backwards compatible for R prior versions 4.1, we will stick with the %>% for a while.

To allow for smooth “piping” we began adding some functions select_phases, subset, select_cases, set_var, set_dvar, set_mvar, set_pvar, and add_l2.

B.2 Important changes with version 0.50

B.2.1 New function names

With version 0.50 scan introduced new names for its functions. The old function names are still usable but they will return a “deprecated” warning telling you to use the new function names.

(rtbl-aliases?) shows the changes.

Table B.1: Scan previous and current function names
Current function name Previous function name
autocorr autocorrSC
corrected_tau corrected_tauSC
describe [since v0.52] describeSC
fill_missing fillmissingSC
outlier outlierSC
overlap overlapSC
power_test power_testSC
rand_test randSC; rand.test
ranks rankSC
rci rCi; rciSC
shift shiftSC
smooth_cases smoothSC
style_plot style.plotSC; style_plotSC
tau_u tauUSC
trend trendSC
truncate_phase truncateSC

B.2.2 Change target variables in functions

All functions in R that analyze data now allow for temporarily changing dependent, phase, and measurement-time variables by adding three argument:

dvar sets the dependent variable.
pvar sets the phase variable.
mvar sets the measurement-time variable.

For example, overlap(exampleAB_add, dvar = "depression") will report overlap parameters for the variable depression while overlap(exampleAB_add) while take wellbeing as the dependent variable (as defined in the scdf).

After finishing the analysis, the variables are set back to their original values as defined in the scdf.