[R] Advice on data format

[Jim Lemon]

Hi Trent,
I may be missing something, but I think that if you simply add your
column with the hospital code to each of the five data frames:

hospital1.df$hospital<-"hospital1"
hospital2.df$hospital<-"hospital2"
...

and then concatenate (rbind) them you can get what you want without
going to a 3D array.

Jim


On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 4:30 PM, Trent Yarwood <trentyarwood at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm responsible for collating data on antibiotic use at my local group of
> hospitals.  I have data for five different hospitals, about 40 different
> antibiotics and monthly data going back to 2006.
>
> At the moment, I have this stored in 5 datafiles, one for each hospital,
> formatted as follows:
>
> date, antibiotic1, antibiotic2, antibiotic3....
> 1-mmm-yy, ab11, ab21, ab31....
> 1-mmm-yy, ab12, ab22, ab32...
>
> This works most of the time for me, because the most common thing I need to
> do is to track a particular hospital's antibiotic use over time (sum of
> columns, as a time series by row).
>
> What I would like to do is to amalgamate the data so instead of analysing
> an individual hospital (ie a datasheet in the current format) is to be able
> to look at a particular antibiotic across the five hospitals.
>
> The best way I can visualise this is having the data in a data cube, with
> each hospital as a single plane. Currently, my hospitals are (x,y,1),
> (x,y,2) etc. What I'd like to do is look at (2,y,z) - for example, the sum
> of antibiotic1 in all hospitals.
>
> I imagine one way of doing this is having a hospital column in the data:
>
> date, hospital, antibiotic1, antibiotic2, antibiotic3...
> 1-mmm-yy, hospital1, a11, a21, a31...
> 1-mmm-yy, hospital2, a11, a21, a31... etc
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1) Is there a better way of storing the data than this?
> 2) Is there an easy way to turn what I have into what I want?
>
> I know that once I have the data sorted, I'll be able to dpyl it into the
> categories I currently use - it's the getting from here to there I need
> help with, please.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Trent.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> --
> Trent Yarwood
> trentyarwood at gmail.com
>
>         [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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