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Exercise

Bootstrapping the average maternal age

Maternal age, or the age of a mother at the time of giving birth, is an important marker of natal health in a population. Too high or low a maternal age can have adverse effects on the outcome of the birth.

You work for the US Department of Health as a Data Analyst. You are given a list, ls_df, of 51 data frames, one for each US state and Washington DC. Each data frame contains the column maternal_age. Your boss would like you to bootstrap a distribution of the mean maternal age for each state. You have already written a loop to do the bootstrap on a single data frame. You need to parallelize this calculation. The parallel package has been loaded for you.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Wrap the bootstrap loop into a function that returns the distribution of the mean.
  • Set up a cluster of four cores.
  • Apply the bootstrap function to ls_df in parallel using parLapply().
  • Stop the cluster once all calculations are done.