New Jersey Public Health Association

Events

Epidemiological Computing and Graphics in Public Health with

Friday, October 30, 8:30am - 4:00pm
UMDNJ School of Public Health
683 Hoes Lane West, Room 2A
Piscataway, NJ 08854

A 1-day course providing
hands-on experience with:

R basics, and more, for data professionals
Example real Public Health applications
Quality color graphics

Who Should Attend
Practitioners of epidemiology and statistical computing, with intermediate to advanced skills, who wish to do analysis and graphics in the R language on IBM compatible PCs, MacIntosh,, or other computers running Windows NT, 2000, XP, Mac OS, Linux or Unix operating systems.

Background
R is a public domain software package in active development by members of universities, government employees and company staff around the world. Books on R in many application areas are available. With R, the data professional can produce publication quality graphics with great flexibility, as well as fit epidemiological and statistical models of cutting edge interest. Concepts originated as the S language at Bell Laboratories. A commercial version exists as the language Splus. An international user conference will be held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2010.

This course will focus on developing programs and applications in R with relevance to public health. This course appears on the NJLMN List of Courses with Approved 5.75 CE hours. Participants are encouraged to bring datasets for discussion and graphing. This is an also opportunity to network with other data professionals.

Course Content

Hour 1: Introductions of attendees. Epidemiology and laboratory calculations. Sources of R documentation and software, installation and system considerations. Basics of the R language. Reading data into R, from various file formats including interactively, EPI-INFO, Excel, DBASE, MDB, Oracle, free and fixed format text files. Discussion of three epidemiology packages. *NEW*

Hour 2: Public health applications and biometric packages. A growth model fitting function for BMI, other body measurements. Wilkinson-Rogers Model notation. Experimental design analyses. Survey analysis. Epidemiological computations. Public Use datasets. LQAS, binary cusum, better Pareto charts. Cholera in Zimbabwe data (personal communication). *NEW*

Hour 3: Graphical facilities of R. Effective plotting. Importing and exporting of data and graphs. Programming, functions, libraries, including user dialogs, recoding of data, and construction of customized menus. Application development exercises. Base , lattice (trellis) and grammar of graphics packages.

LUNCH BREAK

Hour 4-5: Algorithmic statistics *NEW* including recursive partitioning, randomForests, randomSurvivalForests. Regression and Survey analysis examples. Empirical Bayes rate smoothing. Problems and datasets of attendee projects. Future uses and developments of R, including participation in user group, the UseR Conferences. Discussion of student datasets and problems. Intro. to Sweave. *NEW*

Preparatory Reading / Browsing
R for Beginners by Emmanual Paradis
R Reference Card by Tom Short
Data Analysis and Graphics Using R: An example –based approach. by John Maindonald and John Braun.
Creating More Effective Graphs by Naomi B. Robbins
These and other documentation in PDF form are available at the web page http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html

Faculty
Giles L. Crane, MPH, Research Scientist and Statistician, has extensive experience in statistical computing on a wide variety of computers in the pub-lic and private sectors.
Luke Hilgendorff, Course Assistant, is an experienced, public health professional and information technology manager who is retired from the NJ Department of Health and Senior Services.

Location
Location 683 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, Room 2A , 9AM

Tuition
Course tuition is $35 for NJPHA Members and $45 for nonmembers of NJPHA. Tuition includes all instructional materials, USB flash drive, continental breakfast, lunch, continuing education credits, and certificate. Please make check payable to NJPHA.

Application
Please complete the application and mail the application and check to:
Mitchel A. Rosen, Director
Office of Public Health Practice
UMDNJ-School of Public Health
683 Hoes Lane West, Room 115
Piscataway, NJ 08854

All applications must be received by October 21, 2009. Early enrollment is recommended as the class is limited to 20. Prior registration is required for the School of Public Health Site. Acceptances will be sent by email. Participants must pick up Parking Tags on the day at the UMDNJ School of Public Health Office (ground floor). (8 students are required for the class to be held)