Software Development

Our research team has developed a suite of R packages and tools to support advanced, accessible statistical analysis for health and demographic research. While the SAE4Health platform is centered on the sae4health R Shiny app and built primarily on methods from the surveyPrev package, it is part of a broader software framework developed to meet the needs of both technical and applied audiences.

  • We have been working on SUMMER package since 2017 – focuses mostly on mortality estimation.
  • surveyPrev (Richard, Qianyu, Yunhan, Andrea, Jon) is on CRAN and allows SAE for binary indicators.
  • Experience from UN and WHO workshops in Ecuador, South Africa, Malawi, and Rwanda is that researchers need a more user-friendly interface – to this end, the sae4health R Shiny app has been developed by Yunhan and was premiered in a WHO workshop in Rwanda June 2024.
  • U5MR is hard because the data model is complex – can be done in SUMMER.
  • With Ben Mayala, Yunhan, Richard, Jon, and others, created a pipeline for U5MR using DHS data and SUMMER.
  • R survey package now has a generic SAE module thanks to Peter Gao and others.