Data Analysis interview assignment. Data cleaning and Analysis of Causes of Death Public Database.
Database source: https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death?insight=death-rates-from-communicable-and-non-communicable-disease-vary-widely-around-the-world#key-insights
For this assignment I have selected a database that gathers data from the most recent publication of the 2019 Global Burden of Disease study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), and the Global Terrorism Database.
It includes the records for 31 different causes of death, organized by country (and other entities) and by year, covering the period between 1990 and 2019.
Each death was assigned a single cause, based on data on the ‘underlying cause of death’ listed on death certificates, verbal autopsies, and statistical modeling. This is a simplification, as people often have multiple diseases or injuries that contribute to their death, which may also be listed on death certificates.
The continuously widening gap between the developed countries and the poorest communities of the developing world has been a central issue over the last decades. This gap affects several aspects beyond economic indicators like the income level. Among other issues, the gap between high- and low-income countries has been pointed out as one of the factors associated with the prevalence of different causes of death. According to several studies and reports from scientists or organizations such as the WHO, the UN and the World Bank, countries with low income show a higher prevalence of deaths caused by infections, malnutrition, perinatal inconvenients and traffic-related injuries. Worse living conditions like low access to safe drinking water and difficulties to access basic health services and nutrition security tend to be tightly related to infections or nutritional deficiencies. 93% of the world's fatalities on the road occur in low- and middle-income countries, even though these have more than half of the world's vehicles. One of the goals of the present work is to examine possible associations between the income level and these causes of death. Is the difference between the prevalence of these type of deaths in high- and low-income countries significant?
I will also study a particular case. Although Argentina was not a high-income country in the past three decades, and in spite of the subsequent economic crises this country went through, its public health service and policies are renowned as one of the best in the Latin American region. Here, I will explore if the death causes of Argentina coincide with those of high-income countries and those of the Latin American and Caribbean region as a whole. And how these causes trends behaved along the last thirty years.
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a) Explore from a wide scope which are the trends of death causes.
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b) Examine possible associations between the income level and distinct death causes (i.e. road injuries, infections, malnutrition, dementias).
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c) Analyze the main causes of death in Argentina and how are these related to those of the rest of the Latin American region and to high income countries.