Health Economics R Packages

A guide to some R packages that we know about for health economic analysis.

Click here to suggest packages.

Overview

The packages are generally in one of two groups. Either they are specifically designed to perform (some part of) a cost-effectiveness analysis or they are more generic and can be applied to this context.

1. Cost-effectiveness packages

2. Generic packages

   1. Decision trees
   2. Multistate/micro-simulation models
   3. Optimal decision process
   4. Visualisation
   5. Data
   6. Miscellaneous

Below we list the most useful R packages that we know of for each area.

Cost-effectiveness analysis

Name	Description	Package	CRAN (downloads)
BCEA	Bayesian Cost Effectiveness Analysis	✅
DALY	The DALY Calculator - Graphical User Interface for Probabilistic DALY Calculation in R	✅
heemod	Models for Health Economic Evaluation	✅
hesim	Heath economic simulation modeling and decision analysis	✅
iSQoL2	Integration of Survival with QoL or Cost
radiant	Business Analytics using R and Shiny
QoLR	Analysis of Health-Related Quality of Life in Oncology	✅
PROscorer	Functions to Score Commonly-Used Patient-Reported Outcome (PRO) Measures and Other Psychometric Instruments	✅
ArvoRe	Cost-effectiveness Analysis (CEA) implementation for R oriented to compute problems that involve simple decision tree models and Markov models. It offer a graphic user interface (GUI) developed in Tcl/Tk.
heRomod2	Reproducible cost-effectiveness modeling	✅
HEdtree	Utilities for decision tree like models in health economics	✅
DALYcalculator	DALY Calculator R Package
ICEinfer	Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Inference using Two Unbiased Samples	✅
dampack	An R package for decision-analytic modeling	✅
rdecision	Classes and functions for modelling health care interventions using decision trees and semi-Markov models.	✅
dcurve	Decision Curve Analysis.	✅

Decision trees

These packages help you build and navigate tree-like objects.

• data.tree - General Purpose Hierarchical Data Structure
• igraph - Network Analysis and Visualization
• jsonlite - A Robust, High Performance JSON Parser and Generator for R
• rjson - JSON for R
• jsonvalidate - Validate 'JSON'

Multistate/microsimulation models

The related area of survival analysis has its own CRAN Task View: Survival Analysis. This also has a multistate models section and a Simulation section with useful packages. These packages help you simulate populations at individual or group levels.

Some package not included:

• ggm - Functions for graphical Markov models
• rakeR - Easy Spatial Microsimulation (Raking) in R
• des - Discrete-Event Simulation in R
• simmer - Discrete-Event Simulation for R

Optimal decision processes

Packages for optimal control, dynamic programming or maximum utility theory would be useful. There is already the specific CRAN Task View: Optimization and Mathematical Programming.

Of note, and not included in the Task View is the package

• MDPtoolbox - Markov Decision Processes Toolbox
• mdp

Visualisation

These packages make it easier to program with the R language.

• diagram - Functions for visualising simple graphs (networks), plotting flow diagrams
• DiagrammeR - Create Graph Diagrams and Flowcharts Using R

Data

These packages contain data sets to use as training data or toy examples.

• rgho - Access WHO Global Health Observatory Data from R
• AER Lots of data sets and some other code from the book Christian Kleiber and Achim Zeileis (2008), Applied Econometrics with R

Miscellaneous

• demography - Forecasting Mortality, Fertility, Migration and Population Data
• ROCR - Visualizing the Performance of Scoring Classifiers
• pROC - Display and Analyze ROC Curves

You can learn more about packages in R with the CRAN task views.