compIndexBuilder

compIndexBuilder provides an interactive Shiny application for constructing and analysing composite indices.

Launch

library(compIndexBuilder)
compIndexBuilder()

Optional shiny::runApp() arguments can be supplied directly, for example:

compIndexBuilder(launch.browser = TRUE)

Version 2.1.0 accepts wide spreadsheets in which the indicator and year are both kept in the column name. For example:

Country IN1-2019 IN1-2020 IN2-2019 IN2-2020 IN3-2019 IN3-2020
A 12.1 13.0 4.2 4.5 18.0 17.0
B 10.4 11.2 3.9 4.1 20.0 19.3

With Data layout = Auto-detect, the app reshapes this internally to:

Country Year IN1 IN2 IN3
A 2019 12.1 4.2 18.0
A 2020 13.0 4.5 17.0
B 2019 10.4 3.9 20.0
B 2020 11.2 4.1 19.3

Do not rename all columns to years only. Headers such as IN1-2019 are preferred because they preserve both the sub-indicator identity and the time period. Common variants such as IN1_2019, IN1.2019, and IN1 2019 are also recognised.

Missing values

Text codes such as #N/A, N/A, NA, .., ..., and NULL can be standardised to missing values during import. Numeric zero is not treated as missing by default because zero may be a legitimate observation. If a source uses 0 or 0.00 specifically to mean “no data”, enable Treat numeric 0 / 0.00 as missing before reloading the sheet.

After import, missing observations can be removed, retained with available weights re-normalised, median-imputed, interpolated, or imputed with missForest.

Indicator direction

For mixed directions, choose Mixed under Indicator direction. An indicator for which a high value is undesirable (for example IN3) should be set to Lower is better. After indicator-year reshaping, this setting is applied to the indicator itself across all years.

Other features

Version 2.1.0 retains the Version 2 multi-sheet Excel workflow, per-sheet and workbook-wide downloads, normalisation, equal/custom weighting, rankings, time-series analysis and forecasting, entity comparisons, pillar/sub-index construction, PCA, reliability diagnostics, sensitivity analysis, correlation heatmaps, and weighted flow visualisations.