Rcupcake: an R package for querying and analyzing biomedical data through the BD2K PIC-SURE RESTful API

Citation:

Gutiérrez-Sacristán A, Guedj R, Korodi G, Stedman J, Furlong LI, Patel CJ, Kohane IS, Avillach P. Rcupcake: an R package for querying and analyzing biomedical data through the BD2K PIC-SURE RESTful API. Bioinformatics 2017;

Date Published:

2017 Dec 18

Abstract:

Motivation: In the era of big data and precision medicine, the number of databases containing clinical, environmental, self-reported, and biochemical variables is increasing exponentially. Enabling the experts to focus on their research questions rather than on computational data management, access and analysis is one of the most significant challenges nowadays. Results: We present Rcupcake, an R package that contains a variety of functions for leveraging different databases through the BD2K PIC-SURE RESTful API and facilitating its query, analysis and interpretation. The package offers a variety of analysis and visualization tools, including the study of the phenotype co-occurrence and prevalence, according to multiple layers of data, such as phenome, exposome or genome. Availability: The package is implemented in R and is available under Mozilla v2 license from GitHub (https://github.com/hms-dbmi/Rcupcake). Two reproducible case studies are also available (https://github.com/hms-dbmi/Rcupcake-case-studies/blob/master/SSCcaseStu..., https://github.com/hms-dbmi/Rcupcake-case-studies/blob/master/NHANEScase...). Contact: paul_avillach@hms.harvard.edu. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.