concepts: Package concepts

In cturbelin/ifnBase: InfluenzaNet Data Analysis Base

Package concepts

Description

Common concepts used in this package

Seasons

Considering the influenza we dont work with calendar year but with shifted year, centered on the winter season Season names are by convention the year of the first septembre of the season For example, season 2017 is from September of 2017 to August 2018.

Platform

A platform is a set of configurations directives to drive the analysis. It related to an InfluenzaNet platform but can be more extended. The name only refer to the name of the file containing a set of configurations, usually stored in a common directory (in the workspace/project proposed organization it's in share/platform/)

For example platform "fr" can be the analysis configuration to analyse France platform's data, "eu" is used to name the configuration for the analysis at the european level.

In some case you can have several alternatives platform definitions, each in a platform configuration file, to run analysis on different settings.

Survey

In this package perspective, a survey is a name associated with a set of parameters, registered to the package (using the platform file) by platform_define_survey() A survey has a unique name, known by the package, you use to request and manipulate the data.

A survey can be associated with a table name in the database (for the package to know fromwhere to fetch the data), and variable mapping (to recode database column name to more meaningful names), and a recoding mapping ('recodes' entry, recoding a value in the database to an explicit label). It can also have a set of 'labels' (see below) to handle variable user defined variables lists.

The package also provide two survey templates for weekly, intake, and vaccination survey (see survey_template()) respectively named 'eu:weekly' and 'eu:intake', 'eu:vaccination'.

For this package, a survey is a set of variables, some variables can be related to the same question in the survey (for example in case of multiple choice), the survey labels can be used to handle this list (and do not repeat everywhere the harcoded list of variables names).

A survey label is a named list of variable names (as character vector). When creating a survey definition they can be defined as an explicit list (all the names given) or implicitly by using a glob pattern (like "vac.flu.*'). In this last case, the pattern will be used to create the full list using the available variables in the survey definition. The function helper var_labels() can be used to defined a pattern with some exclusion (if all variables names matching the pattern are not to be included in the list)

See vignette("surveys", "ifnBase")

Participants

A participant is an individual subject of a survey response (either by filling by himself the survey or delegate to someone else). Each survey response is connected to a participant (with the "global_id" column in the database). This package doesnt use global_id but match it with survey_user table id, assigning one numerical id to each participant.

An influenzanet user, is not a participant but an individual connected to an account, and several participant can be registered in one account (the set of participants of an account is often called "household").

cturbelin/ifnBase documentation built on Aug. 26, 2024, 12:54 p.m.