dsGeospatialClient :

Client-side package for privacy-preserving geospatial visualisation and analysis for health and environmental data in DataSHIELD

Installation

You can install the development version of dsGeospatial from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("FederatedMethods/dsGeospatialClient")

dsGeospatialClient is currently under active development. For a full list of development branches, checkout https://github.com/FederatedMethods/dsGeospatialClient/branches

About

dsGeospatialClient is a DataSHIELD (https://www.datashield.org)) package that provides federated methods for the visualisation and spatial analysis of health and environmental data while preserving the privacy of individual-level records.

The package has been developed as part of the GROVE project within the DARE UK programme, with the aim of enabling secure, collaborative geospatial analyses across distributed datasets without transferring sensitive household-level data.

Unlike conventional geospatial workflows, dsGeospatialClient performs all computations within the secure DataSHIELD environment. Only non-disclosive summary statistics and visualisations are returned to the analyst. A key point to highlight is that the dsGeospatialClient package (https://github.com/FederatedMethods/dsGeospatialClient/) needs to be used in conjunction with the dsGeospatial package (https://github.com/FederatedMethods/dsGeospatial) - trying to use one without the other makes no sense.

Features

Current and planned functionality includes:

Geospatial visualisation

• Heatmaps of region-level summaries
• Choropleth maps - Geographic hotspot identification
• Spatial correlation analysis

Federated analytics

• Distributed computation across multiple DataSHIELD servers
• Automatic aggregation of study-level results
• Privacy-preserving disclosure controls
• Compatible with Opal, Armadillo and DSLite environments

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:

library(dsGeospatialClient)
## basic example code

Contributing

Contributions, feature requests and bug reports are welcome.

Please see .github/:

• CONTRIBUTING.md
• ISSUE_template.md
• DISCLOSUREissue_template.md

for information on contributing to the project.