# My favorite lines of data wrangling code during the NYC COVID-19 outbreak

In non-coronavirus times, I am the biostatistician for a team of NYC pulmonologists and intensivists. When the pandemic hit NYC in mid-March, I immediately became a 100% 200% COVID-19 statistician. I received many analysis requests, though not all of them from official investigators:

Jokes aside, I was really, really busy during the outbreak. While doing work for both hospital operations and rapidly moving COVID-19 academic research, it was more important than ever to code efficiently and accurately while working with a deluge of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data.

This post contains my favorite (because they were either the most useful or most used) lines of R code for turning very raw-form EHR data into analytical files for descriptive reporting and statistical inference. For the examples, I’ve created data that is a simplified version of my actual data sets – just in case you too would like to pretend you are a COVID-19 biostatistician!

The first data set contains some basic demographic and clinical outcome information for all COVID-19 positive patients who arrived at a hospital. The second data set contains laboratory results for all patients who arrived at the hospital during a certain window of time. In theory, the first data set (patients) should be a subset of the second (labs).

# load tidyverse for data creation and set seed for reproducible data
library(tidyverse)
set.seed(7)

# data set of basic patient demographics
patients <-
tribble(
~age, ~sex, ~height, ~weight, ~current_smoker, ~immunosuppressed,
100, "2020-03-21 00:10", "2020-05-13 12:10",
64, "Male", 68, 199, "Yes", "No",
104, "2020-04-03 12:15", "2020-04-29 18:34",
25, "Male", 72, NA, "Yes", "No",
106, "2020-03-28 12:22", "2020-04-05 19:18",
49, "Female", 64, 189, "No", "Yes",
107, "2020-04-10 18:15","2020-04-14 19:12",
88, "Male", 62, 111, "No", "Yes",
111, "2020-04-18 00:49", "2020-04-25 19:18",
61, "Female", 67, 156, "No", "Yes"
) %>%
# set time zone for date time variables
mutate_at(vars(ends_with("_dt")), ~as.POSIXct(., tz="America/New_York"))

# generate labs data
labs <- map_dfr(100:110, function(x){
lab_time <- sample(seq(as.POSIXct("2020-03-01 00:00"), as.POSIXct("2020-05-30 00:00"), by="hours"), runif(1, 50, 200))
id <- rep(x, length.out=length(lab_time))
lab_name <- sample(c("D-Dimer","Platelet Count","C-Reactive Protein","Lactate Dehydrogenase","LYMPHOCYTE PERC","Absolute Lymphocyte Count"), size = length(lab_time), replace = T)
lab_value <- runif(length(lab_time), 100, 1200)
lab_value <- ifelse(lab_value > 1000, ">1000", as.character(round(lab_value)))
df <- tibble(id, lab_time, lab_name, lab_value)
return(df)
}) 
patients
labs

# 1. tidylog

The first line of R code I found most useful was actually just loading an entire package. It sounds crazy, but that’s all you have to do! You simply load the package, tidylog, after tidyverse (or dplyr or tidyr):

library(tidylog, warn.conflicts = F)

Then, whenever you use one of the previously mentioned packages to wrangle data, tidylog will give you super helpful information about what just happened. For example, if you use mutate on a column, it will tell you how many new NA values were created, if any. It will also remind you which variables you removed, and will give you feedback after you’ve grouped or ungrouped by a certain variable.

patients <-
patients %>%
# compute BMI
mutate(bmi = weight / height^2 * 703) %>%
# remove the patients height and weight from the data frame
select(-height, -weight)
## mutate: new variable 'bmi' with 5 unique values and 20% NA
## select: dropped 2 variables (height, weight)

It’s especially helpful for joining data, because it will tell you how many rows matched in the right and left hand side of your data. In this example, we can see that about 50% of the lab values in labs have a match in patients – as expected. However, one patient in patients does not have any labs in labs – not good! This would be a scenario I would need to follow up with my data source (the Informatics team I work with) to figure out.

patient_labs <-
patients %>%
left_join(labs)
## Joining, by = "id"
## left_join: added 3 columns (lab_time, lab_name, lab_value)
##            > rows only in x     1
##            > rows only in y  (994)
##            > matched rows     629    (includes duplicates)
##            >                 =====
##            > rows total       630
patient_labs

library(tidylog) has singlehandedly helped me detect countless errors while working with rapidly changing COVID-19 data from many different sources. My coworker once summed it up perfectly by saying, “tidylog isn’t just a package, it’s a lifestyle.”

# 2. gtsummary::tbl_summary() + labelled::add_variable_labels + snakecase::to_title_case

gtsummary’s tbl_summary() is hands down my favorite function for making summary tables. It is so smooth and flexible to use, and it works seamlessly with the new gt package for making tables. You simply input a dataset containing the variables you want to summarize, and, optionally, a grouping variable to stratify those summary statistics by, and you’ll immediately have a clean and clear descriptive table!

In this example, I’ll use tbl_summary() to summarize the median and IQR or number and percent of all the demographic variables in our patients data set. We could use this code: the barebones function truly only needs a data set containing the variables of interest, and then gtsummary does all the formatting work:

library(gtsummary)
patients %>%
# select vars of interest for tables
select(age, sex, bmi, current_smoker, immunosuppressed) %>%
tbl_summary(
# make sure all numeric variables are reported as continuous
type = list(all_numeric() ~ "continuous")
) 

That’d be fine, but what I really found to be useful during the NYC outbreak was the labelled function. Since I was constantly presenting data to clinicians, it was important that the tables and figures I showed were clear and concise. I try to always eliminate the “ugly” variable names from my presentations and reports, as a rule… but while doing that as automatically as possible.

It was incredibly helpful to use set_variable_labels() from the labelled package to make the variable names ready for reporting. My favorite trick was to combine this function with the to_title_case() function from the snakecase package. The latter will take any variable of the format snake_case (i.e. all lowercase, with underscores between words), remove the underscores, and capitalize the first letter of each word – just like a title.

If you use to_title_case(names(.)) in the .labels global argument of the set_variable_names() function, it’ll clean up most variables in an extremely intuitive and readable way. Then if there are variables (such as acronyms) that are still not labelled the way you’d prefer them to be, you can directly change them by listing the variable name and the character string you’d like it to say instead. We can do this for BMI, so it does not read “Bmi” when to_title_case transforms the label.

patients %>%
# select vars of interest for tables
select(age, sex, bmi, current_smoker, immunosuppressed) %>%
# edit variable names using labelled package
labelled::set_variable_labels(
# change all variable labels to "Title Case"
.labels = snakecase::to_title_case(names(.)),
# change any extra variables that are not title case, like BMI
bmi = "BMI"
) %>%
tbl_summary(
# don't show missing (unknown) values
missing = "no",
# make sure all numeric variables are reported as continuous
type = list(all_numeric() ~ "continuous")
) %>%
# bold the labels
bold_labels()
## select: dropped 3 variables (id, admit_dt, death_or_discharge_dt)
Characteristic N = 51
Age 61 (49, 64)
Sex
Female 2 (40%)
Male 3 (60%)
BMI 27.3 (23.4, 30.8)
Current Smoker 2 (40%)
Immunosuppressed 3 (60%)

1 Statistics presented: median (IQR); n (%)

So clean and readable, with such little effort! A few other lines of code I usually add to make the tables nicer with very little effort are missing = "no" to the main tbl_summary() argument, and bold_labels() after.

# 3. dplyr::filter() + stringr::str_detect() + tolower()

This has been such a life saver when searching through very long-form COVID-19 data for a particular lab, vital sign, medication, or order of interest. I often don’t know the exact word, much less capitalization, of the string I’m looking for in a data set, but this combination of functions really saves the day.

Here we can use it to figure out the name of patients’ absolute lymphocyte count labs. Of course we could just do something like:

sort(unique(labs$lab_name)) [1] “Absolute Lymphocyte Count” “C-Reactive Protein” [3] “D-Dimer” “Lactate Dehydrogenase” [5] “LYMPHOCYTE PERC” “Platelet Count” But in my actual data sets of upwards of 50 million rows, this would return thousands of results! I discovered the easiest way to find what I was looking for was to first convert the lab_name to all lowercase using tolower(lab_name), and then search for strings using str_detect(), only keeping rows that matched using filter() and then looking at those unique values using pull()* and unique(). labs %>% filter(str_detect(tolower(lab_name), "lymph")) %>% pull(lab_name) %>% unique()  ## filter: removed 1,078 rows (66%), 545 rows remaining [1] “Absolute Lymphocyte Count” “LYMPHOCYTE PERC” Although you don’t have to use pipes to do this, I often used those filtered rows for other exploratory data checks, such as looking at the units or distributions of the tests, so it was helpful to have it in the “tidy” format. *pull() is a somewhat lesser known function of dplyr that extracts a column as a dimensionless vector from a data frame, rather than selecting a single column, which R still treats as a data frame. # 4. readr::parse_number() This is handy whenever I’m dealing with test results that can contain values above or below a detection range. Instead of using as.numeric() on a vector, I’ve switched to always using readr’s parse_number() function. This is because as.numeric() will turn values with meaningful information (such as “>1,000”) into NA. Let’s look at this with the D-Dimer values in patients_labs. If you’ve been keeping up with any of the cytokine storm in COVID-19 headlines, you’ll know that D-Dimers are often sky-high in severely ill COVID-19 patients. So high, that they’re sometimes out of detectable ranges*! patient_labs %>% filter(str_detect(tolower(lab_name), "dimer")) %>% select(lab_name, lab_value) %>% mutate(lab_value_numeric = as.numeric(lab_value), lab_value_parsed_number = readr::parse_number(lab_value)) ## filter: removed 536 rows (85%), 94 rows remaining ## select: dropped 9 variables (id, admit_dt, death_or_discharge_dt, age, sex, …) ## Warning: Problem with mutate() input lab_value_numeric. ## ℹ NAs introduced by coercion ## ℹ Input lab_value_numeric is as.numeric(lab_value). ## Warning in mask$eval_all_mutate(dots[[i]]): NAs introduced by coercion
## mutate: new variable 'lab_value_numeric' with 72 unique values and 23% NA
##         new variable 'lab_value_parsed_number' with 72 unique values and 0% NA

When we use as.numeric() to switch the values from strings, we lose those out of range values. Those are our sickest patients, so if we continue with the analysis, we’ll definitely bias our results. However, if we use parse_number() we can at least evaluate those patients conservatively, using the upper bound of the test detection range.

*Detectable range is usually >55,000 ng/mL, but for the sake of demonstration, let’s pretend it’s >1,000 of the mystery units in my fake data set.

# 5. lubridate’s %within% + interval() + hours()

Last but not least is two beautiful functions from the lubridate package. If you ever find yourself working with time-stamped data, you should definitely check it out. I tried multiple functions and packages at the beginning of the outbreak, and in the end, nothing compared to lubridate, at least for my use-cases.

The %within% function allows you to determine whether a time value (stored in R as a POSIXct object) falls within a window of time. You can specify this window of time using the interval() function. If you have only the start or the end time of the window of interest, you can add or subtract using supplemental functions like days() or hours().

For my COVID-19 research, the pulmonologists were often interested in snapshots of patients relative to a certain time in their disease course, for example, within the first 24 hours after intubation. The lubridate functions made it super easy to extract the labs, vital signs, or other information that happened relative to another date.

Here’s how we could use the aforementioned functions in the patient_labs dataset we made previously. We can extract all the labs relative to 24 hours after the hospital admission date.

library(lubridate)
##
## Attaching package: 'lubridate'
## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
##
##     date, intersect, setdiff, union
patient_labs %>%
filter(lab_time %within% interval(admit_dt, admit_dt + days(1)))
## filter: removed 623 rows (99%), 7 rows remaining

Perfect! I could go on to informatively join this data to another using tidylog, make tables with clean labels using tbl_summary(), set_variable_labels(), and to_title_case(), find further labs of interest with filter(), str_detect(), and tolower(), and make the lab values numeric with parse_number()… the possibilities are endless!

I hope you enjoyed a quick insight into the data side of COVID-19 research, and/or perhaps picked up some useful function combinations for your own applied work with R.

##### Katherine Hoffman
###### Research Biostatistician

I am passionate about meaningful, reproducible medical research.