cases_notifiable: Synthetic Notifiable Disease Case Linelist

In starling: Record Linkage for Public Health Surveillance

Synthetic Notifiable Disease Case Linelist

Description

**Bird note**: Like the individual birds that form a murmuration, each row in this dataset is one record that must find its match in the vaccination register. The dataset is designed so that some birds have a clear pair and some do not — mirroring real-world linkage where not every notified case appears in the AIR.

A synthetic EDIS/case notification linelist for use in starling vignettes, documentation examples, and tests. No real person data. All names, dates of birth, Medicare numbers, and postcodes are randomly generated. 300 records; approximately 200 have a true match in vax_air.

The dataset deliberately includes data quality challenges that mirror real-world linkage scenarios: approximately 5 name typo (adjacent characters swapped), and approximately 10 numbers have one digit corrupted (checksum fails). These are designed to demonstrate check_medicare, preflight, flock, murmuration, and perch.

Usage

data(cases_notifiable)

Format

A data frame with 300 rows and 10 columns:

id_var

character. Unique case identifier ("EDIS_00001", etc.).

true_link_id

character. The matching id_var from vax_air for records with a true match; NA for the ~100 unmatched cases. Used in vignettes for post-hoc recall and precision calculation. Never passed to murmuration().

lettername1

character. First name (standardised form expected by murmuration()).

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% have one digit deliberately corrupted so check_medicare flags them as invalid (flag = 0L).

onset_date

Date. Date of symptom onset (2024 calendar year).

pathogen

character. Notified pathogen: one of Influenza A, Influenza B, COVID-19, RSV, Pertussis, Salmonellosis, Campylobacteriosis.

Source

Generated by data-raw/starling_synthetic_data.R. Run source("data-raw/starling_synthetic_data.R") from the package root to rebuild.

See Also

vax_air for the paired vaccination register dataset. vignette("linked-cohort", package = "starling") for a worked end-to-end linkage example using both datasets.

Examples

## Not run: 
data(cases_notifiable)
head(cases_notifiable)

# Check Medicare validity before linkage
cases_checked <- check_medicare(cases_notifiable)
table(cases_checked$medicare_valid, useNA = "always")

# Pre-linkage quality audit
data(vax_air)
preflight(cases_notifiable, vax_air,
          linkage_vars = c("lettername1", "lettername2", "dob", "medicare10"),
          medicare_col = "medicare10")

## End(Not run)

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