compare~Groups Project


  • Create data summaries for quality control, extensive reports for exploring data, as well as publication-ready univariate or bivariate tables in several formats:

    • plain text (csv), HTML, PDF, Word or Excel

  • Perform figures to quickly visualise the distribution of your data (boxplots, barplots, normality-plots, etc.).

  • Display statistics (mean, median, frequencies, incidences, etc.)

  • Perform the appropriate tests (t-test, Analysis of variance, Kruskal-Wallis, Fisher, log-rank, ...) depending on the nature of the described variable (normal, non-normal or qualitative).

  • Summarize genetic data (Single Nucleotids Polymorphisms) data displaying Allele Frequencies and performing Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium tests among other typical statistics and tests for these kind of data.




compare~Groups Web User Interface (WUI)

This WUI is designed to allow clinicians and scientists to take advantage of the functionality of compareGroups to analyse their epidemiological data, but without the need to install or learn how to use R.

This system has all of the functionality of the current command line version of compareGroups, but has the advantage of allowing you to load and analyse your data on any device with an internet connection.

This WUI has been build entirely using Shiny tools.




Data Security when using the compare~Groups WUI

compareGroups is developed by experienced researchers who are actively involved in epidemiological research on human subjects. We understand very well how important it is to guarantee data confidentiality and security, and we have designed the compareGroups WUI so that your data will remain as secure as at your own institute.

Will my data be safe if I load them into the compareGroups WUI?
The compareGroups WUI is hosted on a secure cloud server platform, which guarantees the physical and electronic security of the WUI, and therefore of any data that are loaded into it. Data loaded into the WUI are transmitted over a secure connection via HTTPS.

What happens to my data when I load them into the compareGroups WUI?
If you're familiar with R, you'll know that it loads all data and performs all calculations within the  RAM  allocated for that R session. This means that it never writes data to the disk, and when the R session ends, all data it has been working on are eliminated.

Accessing the compareGroups WUI page starts a dedicated session of R to read and manipulate your data, and compute your results. However, this R session never saves data to the hard disk of the server it's running on, and only sends results to the WUI, either in the form of displayed tables or plots, or as files to be downloaded by the the user via the SAVE panel.

When you close your browser window, the R session is terminated, and all data are lost. To can verify this for yourself by simply re-loading the WUI page, after which you will see that no data are loaded.  compareGroups developers  only have access to the underlying R code that generates that WUI and performes the calculations, and can never gain access to data that have been loaded into a remote session.

If you have any further concerns or questions about the security of your data when using the compareGroups WUI, please get in touch with us via the contact form.