My first R Shiny Web Application using breast cancer data

I love the idea of making non-R users playing with my datasets. Thanks to R Shiny package this is is now possible and I am going to post here my code for a simple web application.

But first a few lines about Shiny package and my dataset. Okay…if you are in a hurry and want to go straight to check my app, here is the link http://spark.rstudio.com/marqui/breastcancer/

Shiny package

Shiny is a new package created by RStudio (http://www.rstudio.com/shiny/) that makes it very easy to build interactive web applications with R. Yes, that means that anyone can use it, interact with your data and gain insights from your analysis results.

The dataset & my app

The web application I’ve built allows you to explore and visualize data about new cases of breast cancer across countries. The app is quite simple: you first select the continent you are interest in, and you get:

1. a table of countries sorted from the highest breast cancer rate to the lowest
2. a world map with data plotted over it

My dataset includes breast cancer data for 174 countries and it was originally collected by ARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) in 2002. Actually my dataset includes also several other socio-economic variables (which I am not going to explore in this occasion) and went through a previous “cleaning stage” where I added further variables. Check my previous post for more info on that how to plot data over a map with R.   

My code

To build a Shiny app you need to create two separate components (scripts): a user interface definition and a server script. The first is named ui.R and the latter server.R ; bot must be located in the same folder (your shiny app directory). Finally, to run it, you need to first make sure you are pointing to your app directory and execute these commands:

> library (shiny) # to load the shiny library

> runApp() # or runApp(“location of your app folder”) if that is not set as your working directory

Here below are my scripts for the user interface and server components. Oh yes, if you have not clicked yet on the link above, again this is the link where you can access my app http://spark.rstudio.com/marqui/breastcancer/