acro
Tools for the Semi-Automatic Checking of Research Outputs. These are tools for researchers to use as drop-in replacements for common analysis commands.
Science Score: 57.0%
This score indicates how likely this project is to be science-related based on various indicators:
-
✓CITATION.cff file
Found CITATION.cff file -
✓codemeta.json file
Found codemeta.json file -
✓.zenodo.json file
Found .zenodo.json file -
✓DOI references
Found 5 DOI reference(s) in README -
○Academic publication links
-
○Committers with academic emails
-
○Institutional organization owner
-
○JOSS paper metadata
-
○Scientific vocabulary similarity
Low similarity (18.7%) to scientific vocabulary
Keywords
Repository
Tools for the Semi-Automatic Checking of Research Outputs. These are tools for researchers to use as drop-in replacements for common analysis commands.
Basic Info
Statistics
- Stars: 19
- Watchers: 3
- Forks: 4
- Open Issues: 21
- Releases: 0
Topics
Metadata Files
README.md
ACRO: Tools for the Semi-Automatic Checking of Research Outputs
ACRO is a free and open source tool that supports the semi-automated checking of research outputs (SACRO) for privacy disclosure within secure data environments. SACRO is a framework that applies best-practice principles-based statistical disclosure control (SDC) techniques on-the-fly as researchers conduct their analysis. SACRO is designed to assist human checkers rather than seeking to replace them as with current automated rules-based approaches.
The ACRO package is a lightweight Python tool that sits over well-known analysis tools that produce outputs such as tables, plots, and statistical models. This package adds functionality to:
- automatically identify potentially disclosive outputs against a range of commonly used disclosure tests;
- apply optional disclosure mitigation strategies as requested;
- report reasons for applying SDC;
- and produce simple summary documents trusted research environment staff can use to streamline their workflow and maintain auditable records.
This creates an explicit change in the dynamics so that SDC is something done with researchers rather than to them, and enables more efficient communication with checkers.
A graphical user interface (SACRO-Viewer) supports human checkers by displaying the requested output and results of the checks in an immediately accessible format, highlighting identified issues, potential mitigation options, and tracking decisions made.
Additional programming languages used by researchers are supported by providing front-end packages that interface with the core ACRO Python back-end; for example, see the R wrapper package: ACRO-R.
Installation
ACRO is available through PyPI and Conda.
If installed in this way, the examples and data files used therein will need to be copied from the repository.
PyPI:
$ pip install acro
Conda:
$ conda install acro
Examples
See the example notebooks for:
Documentation
The github-pages contains pre-built documentation.
Additionally, see our paper describing the SACRO framework to learn about its principles-based SDC methodology and usage.
Training Materials
For training videos about ACRO, see training videos.
Contributing
See CONTRIBUTING.md
Acknowledgement
This work was funded by UK Research and Innovation under Grant Number MCPC23006 as part of Phase 1 of the DARE UK (Data and Analytics Research Environments UK) programme, delivered in partnership with Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) and Administrative Data Research UK (ADR UK). The specific project was Semi-Automatic Checking of Research Outputs (SACRO).
Owner
- Name: AI-SDC
- Login: AI-SDC
- Kind: organization
- Repositories: 4
- Profile: https://github.com/AI-SDC
Citation (CITATION.cff)
cff-version: 1.2.0
title: ACRO
version: 0.4.9
doi: 10.5281/zenodo.15793559
date-released: 2025-07-02
license: MIT
repository-code: https://github.com/AI-SDC/ACRO
languages:
- English
keywords:
- data privacy
- data protection
- privacy
- privacy tools
- statistical disclosure control
- statistical software
authors:
- family-names: Preen
given-names: Richard John
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3351-8132
affiliation: University of the West of England
- family-names: Smith
given-names: Jim
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7908-1859
affiliation: University of the West of England
- family-names: Albashir
given-names: Maha
affiliation: University of the West of England
- family-names: Davy
given-names: Simon
affiliation: University of Oxford
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9890-3619
- family-names: Migenda
given-names: Jost
affiliation: King’s College London
orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5350-8049
identifiers:
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.7273903
description: This DOI represents all versions, and will always resolve to the latest one.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.7273904
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.0.5.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.7834104
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.0.6.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.7875920
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.1.0.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.8091731
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.2.0.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.8113670
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.3.0.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.8134819
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.4.0.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.8143786
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.4.2.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.8370642
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.4.3.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.8143758
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.4.4.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.10142370
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.4.5.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.12535291
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v.0.4.6.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.13970111
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v0.4.7.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.14765345
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v0.4.8.
- type: doi
value: 10.5281/zenodo.15793559
description: This is the archived snapshot of ACRO v0.4.9.
GitHub Events
Total
- Create event: 25
- Release event: 3
- Issues event: 11
- Watch event: 4
- Delete event: 20
- Issue comment event: 42
- Push event: 73
- Pull request review event: 12
- Pull request event: 38
- Fork event: 2
Last Year
- Create event: 25
- Release event: 3
- Issues event: 11
- Watch event: 4
- Delete event: 20
- Issue comment event: 42
- Push event: 73
- Pull request review event: 12
- Pull request event: 38
- Fork event: 2
Committers
Last synced: almost 3 years ago
All Time
- Total Commits: 187
- Total Committers: 4
- Avg Commits per committer: 46.75
- Development Distribution Score (DDS): 0.23
Top Committers
| Name | Commits | |
|---|---|---|
| Richard Preen | r****n@g****m | 144 |
| pre-commit-ci[bot] | 6****]@u****m | 20 |
| Jim-smith | j****h@u****m | 16 |
| mahaalbashir | m****r@g****m | 7 |
Issues and Pull Requests
Last synced: 6 months ago
All Time
- Total issues: 113
- Total pull requests: 163
- Average time to close issues: 3 months
- Average time to close pull requests: 5 days
- Total issue authors: 8
- Total pull request authors: 7
- Average comments per issue: 1.18
- Average comments per pull request: 1.37
- Merged pull requests: 157
- Bot issues: 0
- Bot pull requests: 75
Past Year
- Issues: 8
- Pull requests: 46
- Average time to close issues: about 2 months
- Average time to close pull requests: 7 days
- Issue authors: 5
- Pull request authors: 5
- Average comments per issue: 1.38
- Average comments per pull request: 0.96
- Merged pull requests: 41
- Bot issues: 0
- Bot pull requests: 29
Top Authors
Issue Authors
- jim-smith (81)
- mahaalbashir (14)
- rpreen (13)
- Joe-Heffer-Shef (1)
- dusan-ilic-mhra (1)
- zizaola (1)
- bloodearnest (1)
- JostMigenda (1)
Pull Request Authors
- pre-commit-ci[bot] (86)
- rpreen (42)
- mahaalbashir (30)
- jim-smith (17)
- dependabot[bot] (6)
- JostMigenda (4)
- bloodearnest (1)
Top Labels
Issue Labels
Pull Request Labels
Packages
- Total packages: 1
-
Total downloads:
- pypi 382 last-month
- Total dependent packages: 1
- Total dependent repositories: 1
- Total versions: 17
- Total maintainers: 2
pypi.org: acro
ACRO: Tools for the Semi-Automatic Checking of Research Outputs
- Homepage: https://github.com/AI-SDC/ACRO
- Documentation: https://ai-sdc.github.io/ACRO/
- License: mit
-
Latest release: 0.4.9
published 8 months ago
Rankings
Dependencies
- actions/checkout v3 composite
- actions/checkout v3 composite
- ad-m/github-push-action master composite
- actions/checkout v3 composite
- PyYAML ==6.0
- matplotlib ==3.6.0
- numpy ==1.23.1
- numpydoc ==1.4.0
- pandas ==1.4.4
- pytest ==7.1.2
- sphinx-autopackagesummary ==1.3
- sphinx-gallery ==0.10.1
- sphinx-issues ==3.0.1
- sphinx-prompt ==1.5.0
- sphinx-rtd-theme ==1.0.0
- statsmodels ==0.13.2
- PyYAML ==6.0
- lxml ==4.9.1
- numpy ==1.23.1
- openpyxl ==3.0.10
- pandas ==1.4.4
- statsmodels ==0.13.2
- lxml *
- actions/checkout v3 composite
- actions/setup-python v4 composite