incidence
reads disease incidence data from a data frame and return an
incidence object. All of these classes inherit from intensity
class.
count: Each sampling unit contains from 0 to theoreticaly an infinity of data.
Number are positive integers.
incidence: Each sampling unit contains an number of diseased plants,
ranging from 0 to n
which is the total amount of plants per sampling
unit.
severity: Each sampling unit contain a percentage of disease, a positive
real number ranging from 0.0 to 1.0.
Class intensity and inherited classes
All the classes recording disease intensity measurements inherit from this
class. The class intensity
is virtual which means that no object of a
class intensity
can be constructed. This class only describes common
features of all the different disease intensity measurements implemented in
this package (count
, incidence
and
severity
). You should call one of these inherited classes
instead, depending on the nature of your data.
By convention, the first columns of the different data frames of each slots
have names, but the spatial, temporal or even disease information do not need
to fit to these conventions or may be less straightforward and need more
columns to record correctly all the information. In such unusual situations,
the automatic options of the analysis tools would need to be overridden to be
able to work in the desired way.
The differences between the different inherited classes regard only the
obs
slot. In the case of count
, the data expected for
each record are positive integers (N+). For incidence
, the data
sets are supposed to be two information set per records, the number of
diseased unit per sampling unit (r) and the total number of units per
sampling unit (n). Note that in its current implementation, n is supposed to
be the same for a whole data set. Unequal sampling units are not implemented
yet. Finally, for severity
, r is positive real ranging from 0
to 1 and depecting a percentage.
space A data frame containing only spatial information. Each row
corresponds to a sampling unit. By convention, the first 3 columns are
names x
, y
, z
.
time A data frame containing temporal information. By convention, the
first column is named t
.
obs A data frame containing disease observations themselves. The name
of the columns may differ between the sub-class chosed to record the data.
Note that it is possible to create a "severity" object but no statistical
tools are currently implemented to deal with such an object.
An intensity
object contains at very least the "pure" intensity
records (column r
) which is a so-called observational variable.
Another observational variable, the number of individuals in a sampling unit
(n
), is present in the case of a incidence
object. Very often
in addition to observational variables, there are spatial (columns x
,
y
and/or z
) and/or temporal (column t
) variables.
Note that the severity
class and the z
variable (the 3rd
spatial dimension) are implemented but no statistical methods use them at
this point.