In markkvdb/ghoR: R interface for the GHO API of the WHO

knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
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  fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
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ghoR

The ghoR package can be used to conventiently load data from the GHO portal of the WHO. The GHO database contains over 20,000 indicators which represent a statistic on a country level.

Installation

You can install the released version of ghoR from CRAN with:

install.packages("ghoR")

And the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("markkvdb/ghoR")

Example

If you are not sure yet which indicator you would like to explore you can discover all indicators by loading it into a dataframe. To prevent downloading the dataset every time you request a dataset, the dataset is saved in ~/.ghoR/. This file is only updated if the WHO website shows that the dataset is last updated after downloading our local version of the dataset.

# First load the library and kable to present table
library(ghoR)
set.seed(420)

# Get a table of all indicators with the code and description.
indicators <- show_GHO_indicators()
indicators_sample <- dplyr::sample_n(indicators, 10)

knitr::kable(indicators_sample)

As an example, we will look at the remaining life expectancy from age $x$ for all available countries, years, sexes and ages. We can load this data using

ex_data <- read_GHO_data("LIFE_0000000035")

knitr::kable(head(ex_data, 10))

Tidying dataset

Datasets downloaded from the WHO website do not follow the tidy philosophy. For the spatial, time and other dimensions, each dimension has a column for the unit of the dimension and one for the value. Most users prefer having their datasets ready for analysis. The ghoR package provides a function to transform the dataset as

tidy_data <- tidy_data(ex_data)

knitr::kable(head(tidy_data, 10))

Updating Datasets

To prevent downloading the dataset every time you request a dataset, the dataset is saved in ~/.ghoR/. This file is only updated if the WHO website shows that the last update date is after the last updated date of the downloaded dataset on the user's computer.

markkvdb/ghoR documentation built on March 2, 2020, 4:52 p.m.