Preliminary infants algorithm

Now available is the in-development release of the infants algorithm, which expands pediatric algorithm to clean 0 - 2 and revises its steps. This is strongly not recommended for general use, and still contains bugs. Possible bugs are enumerated below, and provide a starting point for potential developers:

Same day exclusions are over called in weight and head circumference
Carried forward exclusions are mis-called within that step
Same day exclusions are mis-called within that step
Raw differences step are over called in height
EWMA results missed in height
Carried forward results are missed in head circumference
Various smaller misalignments across exclusion results

If you would still like to use this in-development feature, you can do this in the cleangrowth algorithm by turning on the option prelim_infants:

# prepare data as a data.table
data <- as.data.table(source_data)
 
# set the data.table key for better indexing
setkey(data, subjid, param, agedays)
 
# generate new exclusion flag field using function
cleaned_data <- 
  data[, gcr_result := cleangrowth(subjid, param, agedays, sex, measurement,
                                   prelim_infants = TRUE)]

For information on the steps in the infants algorithm, please see this document.

This algorithm expansion also contains information on smoothing z-scores between observations of 2 and 4 years old. If you would like to use this in your work, code can be found in growth.R lines 525-555.

If you have any feedback on this in-development feature, would like to provide feedback on the algorithm logic or code, or discuss other collaborations, please contact the maintainer of this package, Carrie Daymont.

2024-02-02