mwana
: Utilities for Analysing Children’s Nutritional StatusChild anthropometric assessments, implemented routinely in most countries worldwide, are the cornerstones of child nutrition and food security surveillance around the world. Ensuring the quality of child anthropometric data, the accuracy of child undernutrition prevalence estimates, and the timeliness of reporting is therefore critical in establishing accurate, robust, and up-to-date child undernutrition status globally.
mwana
, term for child in Elómwè, a local language spoken in the
central-northern regions of Mozambique, and also a word with a similar
meaning across other Bantu languages (such as Swahili) spoken in many
parts of Africa, is a package that streamlines child anthropometry data
quality checks and undernutrition prevalence estimation for children
6-59 months old through comprehensive implementation of the SMART
Methodology guidelines in R.
mwana
was borne out of the author’s own experience of having to work
with multiple child anthropometric datasets to conduct data quality
appraisal and prevalence estimation as part of the data quality
assurance team of the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC). The current
standard child anthropometric data appraisal workflow is extremely
cumbersome requiring significant time and effort utilising different
software tools (SPSS, Excel, Emergency Nutrition Assessment or ENA
software) for each step of the process for a single dataset. This
process is repeated for every dataset needing to be processed and often
needing to be implemented in a relatively short period time. This manual
and repetitive process, by its nature, is extremely error-prone.
mwana
, which is primarily an R-based implementation of the ENA for
SMART software, simplifies this cumbersome workflow into a programmable
process particularly when handling large multiple datasets.
[!NOTE]
mwana
was made possible thanks to the state-of-the-art work in nutrition survey guidance led by the SMART initiative. Under to hood,mwana
bundles the SMART guidance through the use of the National Information Platforms for Nutrition Anthropometric Data Toolkit (nipnTK) functionalities inR
to build its handy function around plausibility checks. Click here to learn more about thenipnTK
package.
mwana
do?It automates plausibility checks and prevalence analyses and respective summaries of the outputs.
mwana
performs plausibility checks on weight-for-height z-score
(WFHZ)-based data by mimicking the SMART plausibility checkers in ENA
for SMART software, their scoring and classification criterion.
It performs, as well, plausibility checks on MUAC data. For this,
mwana
integrates recent advances in using MUAC-for-age z-score
(MFAZ) for auditing the plausibility of MUAC data. In this way, when
the variable age is available: mwana
performs plausibility checks
similar to those in WFHZ, however with few differences in the scoring.
Otherwise, when the variables age is missing, a similar test suit used
in the current version of ENA is performed. Read details here.
mwana
mwana
prevalence calculators were built to take decisions on the
appropriate analysis procedure to follow based on the quality of the
data, as per the SMART rules. It returns an output table with the
appropriate results based on the data quality test results.
Fundamentally, the calculators loop over the survey areas in the dataset
whilst performing quality appraisal and taking decisions on the
appropriate prevalence analysis procedure to follow on the basis of the
result.
mwana
computes prevalence for:
mwana
provides weighted prevalence analysis, if needed. And this is
controlled by the user. This is possible in all calculators, including
for MUAC, combined, which is not currently available in ENA for SMART.
In the context of IPC Acute Malnutrition (IPC AMN) analysis workflow,
mwana
provides a handy function for checking if the minimum sample
size requirements in a given area were met on the basis of the
methodology used to collect the data: survey, screening or sentinel
sites. (Check out the vignette).
[!TIP]
If you are undertaking a research and you want to censor your data before including in your statistical models, etc,
mwana
is a great helper, as it identifies flags out of your anthro data.[!WARNING]
Please note that
mwana
is still highly experimental and is undergoing a lot of development. Hence, any functionalities described below have a high likelihood of changing interface or approach as we aim for a stable working version.
mwana
is not yet on CRAN but you can install the development version
from nutriverse R universe as
follows:
remotes::install_github("tomaszaba/ipccheckr")
Then load to in memory with
library(ipccheckr)
If you were enticed to use mwana
package and found it useful, please
cite using the suggested citation provided by a call to citation
function as follows:
citation("ipccheckr")
#> To cite ipccheckr: in publications use:
#>
#> Tomás Zaba, Ernest Guevarra (2024). _ipccheckr: Toolkit for
#> Performing IPC Acute Malnutrition-related Data Checks_. R package
#> version 0.0.0.9000, <https://github.com/tomaszaba/ipccheckr>.
#>
#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
#>
#> @Manual{,
#> title = {ipccheckr: Toolkit for Performing IPC Acute Malnutrition-related Data Checks},
#> author = {{Tomás Zaba} and {Ernest Guevarra}},
#> year = {2024},
#> note = {R package version 0.0.0.9000},
#> url = {https://github.com/tomaszaba/ipccheckr},
#> }
Feedback, bug reports and feature requests are welcome; file issues or seek support here. If you would like to contribute to the package, please see our contributing guidelines.
This project is releases with Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.