Название: R Companion to Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis
Автор: Ajith R
Издательство: CRC Press
Год: 2025
Страниц: 392
Язык: английский
Формат: epub (true)
Размер: 10.1 MB

R Companion to Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis is a companion volume to the classic textbook by Mark Woodward, Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis, Third Edition. It aims to equip the reader with sufficient knowledge to use R for practising epidemiology. Towards this aim, it reworks the examples in the textbook, presenting the code followed by an explanation and its result.

R is free and open source to mean not only that we needn’t pay anything to use it, but also to mean that you are free to modify the software if you are capable. This means that many more people can use it, unlike paid proprietary software, and that many more people contribute to bring cutting edge methods to R. Even for common problems, there are multiple choices of solutions to choose from.

R is a software tool to interact with data to make sense of it. It is thus essential for R to have a system to represent data and a way to interact with it. We interact with R by issuing commands at the R prompt displayed in the R console that we are presented with when we start R either directly or through RStudio. R can also accept commands non-interactively through a script file. There also is the medium of an R markdown file through which we can issue R commands. Typically, we will be using the command prompt to interact with the data, save the useful commands in a script or markdown file to generate final reports at a later stage. Throughout this book we will use the console. In the final chapter, we will see the relevance of R markdown files.

This book is a companion to Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis, written with the goal to enable readers to practice the concepts discussed in that book using R. This book doesn’t teach epidemiology. Neither is this book an R tutorial in the usual sense. This book teaches you to use R as a tool to practice epidemiology. Towards this goal, this book reworks the examples and concepts discussed in Epidemiology: Study Design and Data Analysis (which I will refer to as the textbook) using R. The R code is provided along with an explanation of it. I am sure that that will help develop a pretty decent level of R skill; just that it is not the primary aim.

Key Features:

Almost all of the numerical examples in the textbook are reworked in R
R code is introduced in small portions and explained thoroughly
Complexity of introduced code is increased only gradually
More than 300 commands spanning more than 40 libraries are introduced

The book is intended primarily to be used as a supplement to the textbook by undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of epidemiology and statistics. It will also serve practitioners and researchers in epidemiology who want to learn R for use in their work.