MI-Support Hands-On Workshop

Using R for Data Analysis in Public Health

Session plan

Presentation (30 minutes)

• Uses of R
• Examples of R “in the wild”
• MICOM & MI-Support
  • MI-Support & ICHD

Workshop (1 hour, 30 minutes)

So R? It’s pretty cool?

• What we’ll see today can be done at different levels, with different tools
• Excel, Python, and more can all be leveraged depending on the project/preferences
• R has a good user interface, is free, and has a lot of capabilities, which is why we use it, and recommend it

Uses of R

The list goes on and on and on and on

• Usually think of R for statistical analyses and maybe plots?
• But can be as complicated / or not as you want
  • Dashboards / websites
    
  • Reproducible analyses and reports
  • Data processing checks and pipelines
  • Book and paper publishing

Useful for data management, too!

Standard procedures can be developed and shared within and across teams.

• Data operations
  • Deduplicating records
  • “Fuzzy matching” for place names, demographic categories
  • Supressing identifiable data
• Data communication
  • Standard themes for on-brand visualizations

Example: Dashboard

California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard

Example: UM wastewater monitoring

U-M Wastewater Monitoring Dashboard

Resources for learning R

• The Epidemiologist R Handbook

• R for Data Science
  • Written by Hadley Wickham, the lead author of the tidyverse

Resources for finding help

• Google!
• LLMs, yeah! (With caveats)
  • DO NOT EVER copypaste or upload data into these tools
  • Also, keep in mind, it can send you down a rabbit hole, or into a trap!
    • Ex: geocoding – it’ll tell you how to do it… but maybe that’s bad!

MICOM = Integrator Center

• Part of Insight Net, funded through CDC’s Center for Forecasting & Analytics
• Partnership between the University of Michigan and the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS)
• Work to develop modeling tools and data analytic pipelines
• Integrated into MDHHS operational workflows and decision-making

What is MI-Support?