RStudio

Distributions in cost-effectiveness analysis

In cost-effectiveness analysis, we deal with uncertainty in our parameters by performing sensitivity analyses. In this article, I review how we can generate these distributions for common paramters in a cost-effectiveness analysis. You can view the article at my RPubs page.

Mediation analysis using R

It’s not uncommon to see covariates in a regression model that should not be there. For example, measurements that occur after the treatment assignment are included into a regression model as baseline covariates. Rather, one should consider a mediation analysis.

I wrote a tutorial on how to perform mediation analysis using R on my RPubs site (link).

I know that I make this mistake at times. This tutorial helped me to carefully consider which covariates to include in a regression model and which ones to consider for mediation analysis.

MEPS Tutorial - Some of my helpful notes

There are a lot of lessons that I’ve learned from using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Some of these I learned after I made some mistakes and some I learned from other people. Overall, it’s a short but evolving note of the things that I’ve learned about MEPS and its nuances. I plan on updating this in the future as I expect to learn more new things. But for those who are interested in learning what I’ve learned, you can read my notes on my RPubs page, which is here.

Two-part models in R - Application with cost data

I created a tutorial on how to use two-part models in R for cost data. I used the healthcare expenditures from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey in 2017 as a motivating example. Normally, I use Stata when I construct two-part models. But I wanted to learn how I could do this in R. Fortunately, R has a package called twopartm that was developed by Duan and colleagues. You can find their document for the twopartm package here.

The tutorial I created is located on my GitHub page and RPubs page.

MEPS Tutorial - Part 3: Applying survey weights using R

In this tutorial, we will review how survey weights from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) are applied using R.

The tutorial is available on my GitHub site and RPubs.

The R Markdown code I used to generate this tutorial is available on my GitHub site.

MEPS Tutorial - Part 1: Loading Data into R

For the last couple of years, I have used Stata whenever I worked with MEPS data. Stata is a great statistical program that allows me to script and analyze data from complex survey designs similar to MEPS. However, R is another powerful statistical program that researchers have been using to evaluate and analyze MEPS data. R is free/open source and has a large community that constantly builds packages to improve its utility. Because of its advantages, I wanted to start writing tutorials on how to use R to analyze MEPS data.

This first tutorial provides instructions on how to load MEPS data into R, which is a critical step for data analysis.

You can find the tutorial on my RPubs page (link); I also posted this on my GitHub page (link).

For those of you who are interested in how I developed this tutorial, the R Markdown code is located on my GitHub page (link).

In the coming months, I’ll continue to write more tutorials using R with MEPS data, so stay tuned.