5 ms·

Nothing about this is specific to R. If you want to guarantee reproducible results you have to use a container/image with libraries added at build time. Anytim

• jdc 6y ago
  Yeah or even just vendorize your dependencies.
• tempay 6y ago
  Even this isn’t enough to be reproducible for complex numeric code as switching CPU can make a big difference with small differences being amplified. Hopefully none of those cases matter but it’s hard to definitively prove that.
  • andi999 6y ago
    If the research results depend on small differences being amplified you have a much much bigger problem. (but if course this could happen unnoticed/sloppy work)
    • bonoboTP 6y ago
      That's true but not an excuse! It's still extremely important when assessing an anomaly. If you can say "okay this is a known-good config that gets me the numbers from the paper", it's an enormous help in uncovering what leads to issues. If you can't even get those numbers, then you can suspect any number of things. Maybe you're not using the right data, maybe there was a typo, maybe someone fraudulently manually tweaked the numbers, maybe you forgot to do a step in the processing chain etc etc. There's no way to know what's going on if you can't even be sure how the original numbers were created.