Interactive Data Visualisation with R

In this meeting there will be two introductory practical presentations on using R for interactive data visualisation.

Developing your own COVID-19 Dashboard

Creating interesting visualisations of complex data is often a difficult task in standard statistical packages and excel. The R programming language has many package designed to make visualation easy and effective.

In this talk, we will take a dive into a few key R packages and how to use them to create animated and interactive plots. As an example we will make our own COVID-19 dashboard, based on frequently updated, publicly available data-sets. We will go through various steps of data manipulation with dplyr, obtain elegant plots with ggplot2 and then get them moving with gganimate. Finally, we will look at embedding our visualisations in a RShiny dashboard with a few interactive controls so you’ll always be up to date with the latest COVID-19 numbers.

Presenter: Brad Wakefield, Statistical Consultant with the Statistical Consulting Centre, NIASRA, University of Wollongong.

Using R for Interactive visualisation of medical rehabilitation data

The Australasian Rehabilitation Outcomes Centre (AROC) is the national rehabilitation medicine integrated outcomes centre of Australia and New Zealand. It is governed by the Australian Health Services Research Institute (AHSRI) at UOW. At AROC we collect and report on data from the specialist medical rehabilitation sector. We will be demonstrating our R-Shiny data visualisation applications used in the healthcare sector that sit alongside our benchmark reporting. Among these are our Live and State of the Nations applications that are both built using R-Shiny and integrated into our in-house built web application. These applications allow our users access statistics from a health database spanning back to the commencement of data collection in 2002 and view detailed, interactive data visualisations which can also be exported into PDF reports.

Presenters: Patrick Steele is the IT Director for AHSRI and oversees development of applications and integration of systems such as R-Shiny.
Andrew Fuller is a Data Analyst for AROC and a recent UOW graduate with a background in Medical and Health Sciences and an experienced R-Shiny developer and lead for the AROC R-Shiny applications.