inst/extdata/data_README.md

In starling: Record Linkage for Public Health Surveillance

starling/data/

This directory contains synthetic datasets bundled with the starling package for use in vignettes, documentation examples, and tests.

Generating the data

These files are not committed to version control. To build them, run:

source("data-raw/starling_synthetic_data.R")

from the package root (i.e. with the working directory set to starling/). This produces:

| File | Description | |---|---| | cases_notifiable.rda | 300-record synthetic notifiable disease linelist | | vax_air.rda | 400-record synthetic AIR vaccination history |

Both are also written as CSVs to inst/extdata/ for users who want to load them without data().

Dataset descriptions

cases_notifiable

A synthetic EDIS/case notification linelist. Columns:

| Column | Type | Description | |---|---|---| | id_var | character | Unique case identifier (EDIS_00001 etc.) | | true_link_id | character | Matching id_var from vax_air for true matches; NA for unmatched | | lettername1 | character | First name (standardised by clean_the_nest()) | | lettername2 | character | Surname | | dob | Date | Date of birth | | gender | character | "Male" or "Female" | | postcode | character | Sunshine Coast postcode (4550–4562) | | medicare10 | character | 10-digit Medicare number (~10% deliberately corrupted) | | onset_date | Date | Date of symptom onset (2024 calendar year) | | pathogen | character | Notified pathogen |

true_link_id is the ground-truth column used in the linked-cohort vignette to compute recall and precision. It is never passed to murmuration() — it exists only for post-hoc validation.

vax_air

A synthetic Australian Immunisation Register extract. Columns:

| Column | Type | Description | |---|---|---| | id_var | character | Unique AIR identifier (AIR_00001 etc.) | | lettername1 | character | First name | | lettername2 | character | Surname | | dob | Date | Date of birth | | gender | character | "Male" or "Female" | | postcode | character | Sunshine Coast postcode | | medicare10 | character | 10-digit Medicare number (all valid checksums) | | vax_date_1 – vax_date_4 | Date | Vaccination dates (NA if fewer doses) | | vax_type_1 – vax_type_4 | character | Vaccine type per dose |

Data quality features (deliberate, for demonstration)

• ~200 of the 300 cases have a true match in vax_air (true_link_id is non-NA)
• ~5% of matched case names contain a deliberate adjacent-character typo
• ~10% of case Medicare numbers have one digit corrupted (checksum fails)
• All AIR Medicare numbers have valid checksums
• These features are designed to demonstrate check_medicare(), preflight(), flock(), murmuration(), and perch() on realistic messy data

starling documentation built on July 10, 2026, 9:07 a.m.