Hi all, I'm responsible for collating data on antibiotic use at my local group of hospitals. I have data for five different hospitals, about 40 different antibiotics and monthly data going back to 2006.
At the moment, I have this stored in 5 datafiles, one for each hospital, formatted as follows: date, antibiotic1, antibiotic2, antibiotic3.... 1-mmm-yy, ab11, ab21, ab31.... 1-mmm-yy, ab12, ab22, ab32... This works most of the time for me, because the most common thing I need to do is to track a particular hospital's antibiotic use over time (sum of columns, as a time series by row). What I would like to do is to amalgamate the data so instead of analysing an individual hospital (ie a datasheet in the current format) is to be able to look at a particular antibiotic across the five hospitals. The best way I can visualise this is having the data in a data cube, with each hospital as a single plane. Currently, my hospitals are (x,y,1), (x,y,2) etc. What I'd like to do is look at (2,y,z) - for example, the sum of antibiotic1 in all hospitals. I imagine one way of doing this is having a hospital column in the data: date, hospital, antibiotic1, antibiotic2, antibiotic3... 1-mmm-yy, hospital1, a11, a21, a31... 1-mmm-yy, hospital2, a11, a21, a31... etc Two questions: 1) Is there a better way of storing the data than this? 2) Is there an easy way to turn what I have into what I want? I know that once I have the data sorted, I'll be able to dpyl it into the categories I currently use - it's the getting from here to there I need help with, please. Cheers, Trent. -- -- Trent Yarwood trentyarw...@gmail.com [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.