Statistics, Department of

 

The R Journal

Date of this Version

6-2012

Document Type

Article

Citation

The R Journal (June 2012) 4(1)

Comments

Copyright 2012, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 3.0 Unported

Abstract

Many common diseases, such as the flu and cardiovascular disease, increase markedly in winter and dip in summer. These seasonal patterns have been part of life for millennia and were first noted in ancient Greece by both Hippocrates and Herodotus. Recent interest has focused on climate change, and the concern that seasons will become more extreme with harsher winter and summer weather. We describe a set of R functions designed to model seasonal pat terns in disease. We illustrate some simple descriptive and graphical methods, a more complex method that is able to model non-stationary patterns, and the case-crossover to control for seasonal confounding.

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