This Computational Provenance Record documents the statistical computing environment, software dependencies, computational provenance, and bibliographic references associated with the RAISINS Descriptive Statistics module. It is intended to support computational reproducibility and software transparency. Detailed statistical methodology, mathematical derivations, and user guidance are provided separately in the official module documentation.
Mean, median, standard deviation, variance, minimum, maximum, range, first and third quartiles (Q1, Q3), and IQR, all computed with na.rm = TRUE
Distribution shape
Skewness and kurtosis via moments::skewness() and moments::kurtosis(). The moments convention returns population (biased) skewness and non-excess kurtosis, for which a normal distribution has kurtosis ≈ 3
Grouping
Group-wise summaries when a grouping variable is selected (dplyr::group_by()); pooled summary otherwise
Normality Test
Default test
Shapiro-Wilk (shapiro.test()); valid for 3 ≤ N ≤ 5000
Alternative test
Anderson-Darling (nortest::ad.test()); valid for N > 7
Decision rule
p < 0.05 is reported as a departure from normality
Correlation
(cor())
Method
Pearson (default); Spearman and Kendall optional
Missing data
use = "pairwise.complete.obs"
Chi-square Test
of Independence
(chisq.test())
Test
Pearson chi-square; Yates continuity correction is applied automatically for 2×2 tables
Second variable handling
Categorical variable used as-is; integer-like variable with ≤ 7 unique levels treated as a factor; continuous variable discretised to Low / Medium / High using cut points at mean ± 1 SD
Cross-tab percentages
Row and column percentages via prop.table()
5 R Code for Key Analytical Steps
The code blocks below demonstrate the exact computation behind each reported result using the iris dataset from the datasets package. All blocks are illustrative and non-executing (eval = FALSE).
data(iris)num <- iris[sapply(iris, is.numeric)]cor(num,use ="pairwise.complete.obs",method ="pearson") # or "spearman", "kendall"
5.4 Chi-square Test of Independence
data(iris)# first variable categorical (Species); second variable continuous -># discretised to Low / Medium / High at mean +/- 1 SDclassify_num <-function(z) { m <-mean(z, na.rm =TRUE) s <-sd(z, na.rm =TRUE)cut(z,breaks =c(-Inf, m - s, m + s, Inf),labels =c("Low", "Medium", "High"),right =TRUE)}tbl <-table(iris$Species, classify_num(iris$Sepal.Length))prop.table(tbl, 1) *100# row percentagesprop.table(tbl, 2) *100# column percentageschisq.test(tbl)
Explore the entire Descriptive Statistics module in preview mode using our demo datasets. To submit suggestions or report a workflow issue, please use the discussion section below, or visit the official RAISINS website.
6 RAISINS Native Statistical Framework
RAISINS uses R for all its statistical computations. Every package used to generate major results is listed and demonstrated with examples, so results can be reproduced independently. These results are then organized and formatted on the RAISINS website along with visualisation to make them easier to use and interpret. RAISINS also has its own custom-built statistical tools for managing workflows, validating results, and generating reports. Details of these are not fully covered here, they’re shared with outside researchers only on request, and are subject to licensing terms.
7 Package References
R Core Team. (2025). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/
Komsta, L., & Novomestky, F. (2022). moments: Moments, Cumulants, Skewness, Kurtosis and Related Tests (R package version 0.14.1). https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.moments
Gross, J., & Ligges, U. (2015). nortest: Tests for Normality (R package version 1.0-4). https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.nortest
Wickham, H., François, R., Henry, L., Müller, K., & Vaughan, D. (2023). dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation (R package version 1.1.4). https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.dplyr
Allaire, J. J., Xie, Y., Dervieux, C., McPherson, J., Luraschi, J., Ushey, K., Atkins, A., Wickham, H., Cheng, J., Chang, W., & Iannone, R. (2026). rmarkdown: Dynamic Documents for R (R package version 2.31). https://github.com/rstudio/rmarkdown