Verbal autopsy (VA) is a survey-based tool widely used to infer cause of death (COD) in regions without complete-coverage civil registration and vital statistics systems. In such settings, many deaths happen outside of medical facilities and are not officially documented by a medical professional. VA surveys, consisting of signs and symptoms reported by a person close to the decedent, are used to infer the cause of death for an individual, and to estimate and monitor the cause of death distribution in the population. Several classification algorithms have been developed and widely used to assign cause of death using VA data. However, The incompatibility between different idiosyncratic model implementations and required data structure makes it difficult to systematically apply and compare different methods. The openVA package provides the first standardized framework for analyzing VA data that is compatible with all openly available methods and data structure. It provides an open-sourced, R implementation of several most widely used VA methods. It supports different data input and output formats, and customizable information about the associations between causes and symptoms. The paper discusses the relevant algorithms, their implementations in R packages under the openVA suite, and demonstrates the pipeline of model fitting, summary, comparison, and visualization in the R environment.
翻译:尸体解剖(VA)是一种调查工具,广泛用于在没有完整覆盖民事登记和生命统计系统的地区推断死亡原因(COD),在这种环境下,许多死亡发生在医疗设施之外,没有医学专业人员的正式记录。VA调查由接近死者的人报告的迹象和症状组成,用来推断个人死亡原因,估计和监测人口死亡分布的原因。一些分类算法已经开发出来,并广泛用于使用VA数据确定死亡原因。然而,不同特征综合模型的实施和所需数据结构之间的不兼容性使得很难系统地应用和比较不同方法。开放VA成套方法为分析VA数据提供了第一个标准化框架,与所有公开可得的方法和数据结构相容。它提供了一个公开来源,对最广泛使用的VA方法进行了研究实施。它支持不同的数据输入和产出格式,以及可定制的关于因果和症状之间关联的信息。文件讨论了相关的算法、在开放VA套房套件中的应用情况、在开放VA套房套件中进行对比,并展示了可视化的模型。