Flag low counts and set them to NAs

Low counts may be genuine, but they can also reflect actually missing data or strong under-reporting. This function aims to detect the latter by flagging any count below a certain threshold, expressed as a fraction of the median count. Setting low values to NAs can be useful to help fitting temporal trends to the data, as zeros / low counts can throw off some models (e.g. Negative Binomial GLMs).

Usage

flag_low_counts(x, counts = NULL, threshold = 0.001, set_missing = TRUE)

Arguments

x

An incidence2::incidence object.

counts

A tidyselect compliant indication of the counts to be used.

threshold

A numeric multiplier of the median count to be used as threshold. Defaults to 0.001, in which case any count strictly lower than 0.1% of the mean count is flagged as low count.

set_missing

A logical indicating if the low counts identified should be replaced with NAs (TRUE, default). If FALSE, new logical columns with the flag_low suffix will be added, indicating which entries are below the threshold.

Value

An incidence2::incidence object.

Author

Tim Taylor and Thibaut Jombart

Examples

if (requireNamespace("outbreaks", quietly = TRUE) &&
    requireNamespace("incidence2", quietly = TRUE)) {
  data(covid19_england_nhscalls_2020, package = "outbreaks")
  dat <- covid19_england_nhscalls_2020
  i <- incidence(dat, "date", interval = "isoweek", counts = "count")
  plot(i)
  plot(flag_low_counts(i, threshold = 0.1))
  plot(flag_low_counts(i, threshold = 1), title = "removing counts below the median")
}
#> Warning: Removed 19 rows containing missing values (`position_stack()`).