Creating a many models workflow in Tidymodels?

[healthy-psycho]

Hi all,

I'm curious if an expert has thoughts on how to use the tidy models framework for a 'Many models' kind of analysis, similar to the chapter in Advanced R.

As an example, I would be curious how to translate the following workflow that tests multiple mediators at once into a tidy models workflow:

analysis.dict <-
  tribble(
    ~vname,                       ~role,
    "lifespan",                  "outcome",
    "county_voting_2000",        "predictor",
    "county_health_spending",    "mediator",
    "county_economic_growth",    "mediator",
    "county_education",          "mediator"
  )

analysis.formulas <-
  tribble(
    ~formula_step, ~formula_fun,
    "mediation",   "test_mediator"
  )

test_mediator <- function( mediator ) {
   as.character(
    glue(
      "lifespan ~ county_voting_2000 + {mediator}",
      mediator = mediator
    )
  )
}

analysis.setup <-
  analysis.dict %>%
  dplyr::filter( role == "mediator" ) %>%
  expand_grid( analysis.formulas )

analysis <-
  analysis.setup %>%
  mutate(
    model_formula = pmap_chr(
      .l = list(
        .f = formula_fun,
        mediator = mediator
      ),
      .f = invoke
    ),
    fit = pmap(
      .l = list(
        .f = lm,
        formula = model_formula,
        data = list( data )
      ),
      .f = invoke
    )
  )

Essentially, I can permute either the models, the formulas, or any of the variables based on role into a dataframe of the analyses to run and then execute them. I can also add in a setup to permute model functions too.

It is not obvious to me how to do this kind of thing in tidymodels, but it is a workflow that I run into constantly. Sometimes I want to test multiple formulas, whereas at other times (like this one), I have one general formula I want to test with n variables. At other times I want to do exactly the same thing but with 3-4 outcomes.

It seems more like tidy models is setup to use the same formula on multiple datasets, but I don't have much experience with it, so any thoughts on how to do these kinds of permutation workflows would be great