I recently got interested in Spatial Epidemiology. I had never done studies that used health related datasets, neither had I used R; so we a week for myself, I thought it would be interesting to create a small project using R.
I had recently read about Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD, which are not rare, but mostly affect neglected regions of the world. There is only a limited spatial analysis (compared to Zika or ebola), even though the impacts of NTDs in some countries are tremendous.
I downloaded some datasets for 8 NTDs from the WHO website, and some prevalence data from ntdmaps.org and tried to find trends in the dataset. It was mostly exploratory, I have published a long description of the project on my Github blog: http://helenedraux.github.io.
In that blog post, I used Carto to show some of the data, and some R packages to make maps and graphs, as well as Tableau. Carto is hosted on my server (always difficult to use their platform once you know how to use the javascript library.. even though their new platform is actually really amazing). Tableau Public can easily be embedded into a webpage too, so that’s what I did. It makes interactive graphs really easy.