Compute Summary Measures of Health Inequality.
healthequal
The healthequal R package provides computational tools for calculating summary measures of health inequality.
Installation
You can install the released version of healthequal from CRAN with:
install.packages("healthequal")
The development version can be installed from GitHub with:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("WHO/healthequal")
Measures of health inequality included in healthequal
:
The following summary measures of health inequality are included in the healthequal
package:
Simple measures
- Difference (
d
) - Ratio (
r
)
Disproportionality measures (ordered dimensions)
- Absolute concentration index (
aci
) - Relative concentration index (
rci
)
Regression-based measures (ordered dimensions)
- Slope index of inequality (
sii
) - Relative index of inequality (
rii
)
Variance measures (non-ordered dimensions)
- Between-group variance (
bgv
) - Between-group standard deviation (
bgsd
) - Coefficient of variation (
covar
)
Mean difference measures (non-ordered dimensions)
- Mean difference from mean - unweighted and weighted (
mdmu
andmdmw
) - Mean difference from best-performing subgroup - unweighted and weighted (
mdbu
andmdbw
) - Mean difference from reference subgroup - unweighted and weighted (
mdru
andmdrw
) - Index of disparity - unweighted and weighted (
idisu
andidisw
)
Disproportionality measures (non-ordered dimensions)
- Theil index (
ti
) - Mean log deviation (
mld
)
Impact measures
- Population attributable risk (
parisk
) - Population attributable fraction (
paf
)
Package data
The healthequal
package comes with sample data for users to be able to test the package functions. The OrderedSample
and NonorderedSample
data contain data disaggregated by economic status and subnational region, respectively, for a single indicator.
Ordered and Nonordered data
data(OrderedSample)
head(OrderedSample)
data(NonorderedSample)
head(NonorderedSample)
Disagregated data
The OrderedSampleMultipleind
and OrderedSampleMultipleind
data contain disaggregated data by economic status and subnational region, respectively, for two indicators.
data(OrderedSampleMultipleind)
head(OrderedSampleMultipleind)
data(NonorderedSampleMultipleind)
head(NonorderedSampleMultipleind)
More info on the datasets
For information about the datasets, type the following commands, which will display the corresponding dataset help file:
?healthequal::OrderedSample
?healthequal::NonorderedSample
?healthequal::OrderedSampleMultipleind
?healthequal::NonorderedSampleMultipleind
?healthequal::IndividualSample
References:
Schlotheuber, A., & Hosseinpoor, A. R. (2022). Summary measures of health inequality: A review of existing measures and their application. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19 (6), 3697.