Summarizing Health Metrics: From Quarto to CRAN

DSLC.io Project-Club - April 2025 (Second Saturday) 📚

Welcome to the repository for the April 2025 DSLC.io Project-Club session! In this session, I will walk you through how I summarized my journey and learning in health metrics as a collaborator with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and how I wrapped this knowledge into a comprehensive book titled:

Health Metrics and the Spread of Infectious Diseases: Machine Learning Applications and Spatial Modelling Analysis with R

As part of this project, I developed a supporting R package called {HMSIDwR}, which was published on CRAN on 2024-11-13 to facilitate reproducibility and provide accessible tools for users to analyze health metrics and infectious disease spread. This repository contains the materials from the talk, along with links to the book, package, and further resources.

Session Overview

In this session, I will cover the following topics:

1. The Journey – How I started summarizing my work on health metrics and infectious diseases during my time at IHME.
2. The Book – Writing the book using Quarto, detailing the machine learning and spatial modeling techniques applied to health metrics and infectious diseases.
3. The R Package – Developing and publishing the {HMSIDwR} package on CRAN to support the analyses presented in the book.
4. Quarto Workflow – A demonstration of how Quarto integrates with R code, data, and visualizations to create a seamless, reproducible workflow.
5. CRAN Publishing – The process of creating a package and publishing it on CRAN to make it accessible to others.

What’s Included in This Repository

• Slides: The slides used during the presentation

• Book and Package Links:

  • Book: Health Metrics and the Spread of Infectious Diseases: Machine Learning Applications and Spatial Modelling Analysis with R
  • CRAN Package: {HMSIDwR}

Additional Resources

• YouTube Course: I am currently creating an accompanying course on my YouTube channel that dives deeper into the book’s concepts and provides hands-on tutorials with the {HMSIDwR} package.
• Blog Posts: Stay tuned for blog posts on the project and behind-the-scenes insights into the book creation process.

Getting Started

1. Install the {HMSIDwR} Package:

install.packages("HMSIDwR")

2. Explore the Book Content:

• You can access the full book, which provides a comprehensive overview of the health metrics calculations, machine learning models, and spatial analysis techniques used
• Run Code Examples
• Check out the code snippets in this repository to replicate key analyses from the book and explore the examples with your own data.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License – see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgements

• Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) for their ongoing support and the opportunity to collaborate on health metrics analysis.
• The DSLC.io Project-Club for hosting the talk and providing a platform for sharing knowledge.

Contact

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about the book or package, feel free to reach out:

• Email: fede.gazzelloni@gmail.com
• Website: federicagazzelloni.com