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Brad Cannell edited this page Dec 15, 2023 · 14 revisions

Welcome to the R for Epidemiology wiki!

Welcome to the wiki for the R for Epidemiology (R4Epi) textbook! This wiki is primarily intended to be used to record procedures for authoring, developing, and formatting the book.

If you notice an error or typo in the book, please see the Contributing to R4Epi section of the book, which will walk you through how to suggest edits. Alternatively, you can also create an issue in the Issues section of this GitHub repository.

This wiki can be edited directly through the web browser or cloned locally and edited in the r4epi.wiki file.

Page contents

Goals

The goals of the book are given in its introduction. However, they are probably worth repeating in this wiki.

The goals of this book are:

  1. To teach readers how to use R and RStudio as tools for applied epidemiology1. Our goal is not necessarily to teach readers to be computer scientists or advanced R programmers. Therefore, some readers who are experienced programmers may catch some technical inaccuracies regarding what we consider to be the fine points of what R is doing “under the hood.”

  2. To make this writing as accessible and practically useful as possible without stripping out all of the complexity that makes doing epidemiology in real life a challenge. In other words, We’re going to try to give readers all the tools they need to do epidemiology in “real world” conditions (as opposed to ideal conditions) without providing a whole bunch of extraneous (often theoretical) stuff that detracts from doing. Having said that, we will strive to add links to the other (often theoretical) stuff for readers who are interested.

  3. To teach readers to accomplish common tasks, rather than teach them to use functions or families of functions. We have noticed that there tends a focus on learning all the things a function, or set of related functions, can do in many R courses and texts. It’s then up to you, the reader, to sift through all of these capabilities and decided which, if any, of the things that can be done will accomplish the tasks that you are actually trying to accomplish. Instead, we will strive to start with the end in mind. What is the task we are actually trying to accomplish? What are some functions/methods we could use to accomplish that task? What are the strengths and limitations of each?

  4. To start each concept by showing readers the end result and then deconstruct how we arrived at that result, where possible. We find that it is easier for many people to understand new concepts when learning them as a component of a final product.

  5. To learn concepts with data instead of (or alongside) mathematical formulas and text descriptions, where possible. We find that it is easier for many people to understand new concepts by seeing them in action.

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What’s different about this book?

There are already several great Epidemiology textbooks out there. How is this book different? 1. This book is very visual. We make liberal use of pictures, diagrams, plots, R code, and analysis output. 2. This book uses a lot of data simulation to show (as opposed to just discuss) many of the complex topics discussed in this text. 3. This book teaches readers how to use R to practice epidemiology.

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What is contained in this wiki?

Again, this wiki is primarily intended to be used to record procedures for authoring, developing, and formatting the book. Using the sidebar to the right ➡️

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Footnotes

  1. In this case, “tools for applied epidemiology” means
  1. Understanding epidemiologic concepts.
  2. Completing and interpreting epidemiologic analyses.
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R for Epidemiology Wiki

Authoring Procedures

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