02 April 2024
This page hosts the R tutorial materials for the MSF UK R epi coaching series. This coaching series was developed to support MSF R public health epidemiology users who have already undertaken some R courses and/or have some limited experience of R, but are still at an early stage in their R journey. The materials may also be useful to more experienced R users who want a quick refresher on how to undertake some common analytical tasks in R.
The content of these sessions is inspired by requests from the coaching group. The tutorials are written by MSF OCA epidemiology advisors and tailored to the needs of the group. Each session typically focuses on a task that one or more members is undertaking during their daily work. The material for each session includes an R markdown document used to create a HTML tutorial, which introduces some brief context (a made up scenario) on which some exercises are based. For each exercise, there is some example code, followed by a ‘your turn’ section, which invites users to try the code themselves using different parameters. There are hint and solution sections at the end of each exercise, which can be revealed on a click if the users need more guidance.
The coaching sessions are usually run as an online interactive session, however the materials can also be used independently for self-learning.
The style and approach taken by the tutorials follows closely that presented in the Epidemiologist R handbook. For simplicity, in most sessions we have also used the data sets that accompany the handbook for the exercises. We gratefully acknowledge and thank the authors of the Epidemiologist R handbook for this invaluable resource.
Currently you can access tutorials for the following sessions:
This list will be updated as new sessions become available.
If you would like to try the tutorials, we suggest you do the following:
outputs and click on the HTML file inside it
(it will open in your internet browser, but does not require an
internet connection).If you are an experienced R user and would like to add to this tutorial or the coaching series, please see below for how to contribute.
These tutorials are covered by a Gnu General Public Licence version 3 (GPL-3). Please read the licence conditions before using or distributing them.
The R code for the tutorials and practical materials on this page are hosted on the MSF UK R epi coaching repository. Revisions and contributions are welcome; please check out your own branch to commit the updates and then submit a pull request. Write access to the repository can be provided on request.
Comments and suggestions are welcome. If you have found a bug in the tutorials, please raise an issue about it on the MSF UK R epi coaching repository issues page, clearly stating the nature of the problem and providing a reproducible example. You can also use the issues page to suggest revisions, new features or topics to cover in future tutorials.
This repository is currently maintained by:
If you have any questions about the content of this repository, the best way to contact the maintainers is to create an issue (we will be automatically notified).