Increasing workflow development speed and reproducibility with Vectools

What is it about?

Despite advances in bioinformatics, custom scripts remain a source of difficulty, slowing workflow development and hampering reproducibility. Here, we introduce Vectools, a command-line tool-suite to reduce reliance on custom scripts and improve reproducibility by offering a wide range of common easy-to-use functions for table and vector manipulation. Vectools also offers a number of vector related functions to speed up workflow development, such as simple machine learning and common statistics functions.

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Why is it important?

Vectools reduces the need for custom scripts and is simpler to use than Coreutils. Vectools also offers various other functionalities, such as allowing easy incorporation of machine learning into analysis pipelines. Furthermore, Vectools helps to increase reproducibility by making analysis pipelines easier to share and reducing bugs. Vectools emphasizes ease-of-use by hosting a curated list of common functions. Thus, one common use-case of Vectools when combined with a workflow-manager is to replace work done in spreadsheets. With Vectools, these easy-to-update pipelines will also be easy to share, making valuable tool for bioinformatics research.

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