WONDER is an R package for importing and working with data from the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC) WONDER online databases.
Currently, this package provides the following key function:
import_WONDER_UCD()
... for importing data that are manually downloaded, as text files, from the Underlying Cause of Death (UCD) web interface. You typically need to download these files yourself, as there's no way to use the WONDER API to get place-specific (e.g. county-specific) data. But this package should help with importing, tidying, combining, visualizing, etc.!
Examples of downloaded .txt files are provided in [inst/extdata/].
If you use the functios above to import such text files, the results will be tibbles with columns that are unit-aware.
Incidence rates will have units of person-1 yr-1.
Because incidence rates can be obtained as point estimates with
upper and lower bounds (i.e., confidence intervals), this package also
provides a class, ptrg ("point range"), that encapsulates these in a tidy way. Columns rate_adj (age-adjusted rates) and rate_crude will be like this. You cannot sum these point ranges as-is, but you can extract the point estimates from them using either as.numeric() or est().
For use cases / examples, please have a look at the "UCD" vignette:
vignette("UCD", package = "WONDER")
Note that for the above vignette(...) to work, you must have passed the build_vignettes option when installing, e.g.:
devtools::install_github("BAAQMD/WONDER", build_vignettes = TRUE)