Working with Data in Public Health

This book provides a complete practical guide of processing data in public health with R language. On the basis of the author’s research and teaching experiences, this book serves either as a textbook for undergraduates and graduates in public health or as a tutorial for self-learning. Many first-hand examples are presented with source data, R scripts, and graphs, as well as detailed explanations, which could be easily reproduced by readers so as to better understand the data processing principles and procedures. Popular and novel R packages in public health are introduced as well.

Table of Contents

1 Preparing Tools

2 Planning Data

3 Collecting Data

4 Importing and Exporting Data

5 Cleaning Data

6 Describing Data

7 Analyzing Data

8 Visualizing Data

9 Presenting Data

10 Managing Data

About the Author

Peng Zhao is an Assistant Professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He got a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. from Peking University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Bayreuth. He used to work as a post-doc at the University of Innsbruck and the Max Planck Institute. He is the module leader of the undergraduate modules “Methods for Analysing Public Health IV: Working in the Field: Data” and “Statistics for Environmental Scientists”. He published the books “Learning R: From the Very beginning” in 2018 and “Modern Statistical Graphs” in 2021 as the first author of both.