Estimate Age from First Name

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Today I read a cute post from Flowing Data on the most trendy names in US history. What caught my attention was a link posted in the article to the source data, which happens to be yearly lists of baby names registered with the US social security agency since 1880
(see here). I thought that it might be good to compile and use these lists at work for two reasons:

(1) I don’t have experience handling file input programmatically in R (ie working with a bunch of files in a directory instead of manually loading one or two) and
(2) It could be useful to have age estimates in the donor files that I work with (using the year when each first name was most popular).

I’ve included the R code in this post at the bottom, after the following explanatory text.

I managed to build a dataframe that contains in each row a name, how many people were registered as having been born with that name in a given year, the year, the total population for that year, and the relative proportion of people with that name in that year.

Once I got that dataframe, I built a function to query that dataframe for the year when a given name was most popular, an estimated age using that year, and the relative proportion of people born with that name from that year.

I don’t have any testing data to check the results against, but I did do an informal check around the office, and it seems okay!

However, I’d like to scale this upwards so that age estimates can be calculated for each row in a vector of first names. As the code stands below, the function I made takes too long to be scaled up effectively.

I’m wondering what’s the best approach to take? Some ideas I have so far follow:

  • Create a smaller dataframe where each row contains a unique name, the year when it was most popular, and the relative popularity in that year. Make a function to query this new dataframe.
  • Possibly convert the above dataframe into a data table and then building a function to query the data table instead.
  • Failing the efficacy of the above two ideas, load the popularity data into Python, and make a function to query it there instead.

    Does anyone have any better ideas for me ?

    library(stringr)
    library(plyr)
    # We're assuming you've downloaded the SSA files into your R project directory.
    file_listing = list.files()[3:135]
    for (f in file_listing) {
    year = str_extract(f, "[0-9]{4}")
    if (year == "1880") { # Initializing the very long dataframe
    name_data = read.csv(f, header=FALSE)
    names(name_data) = c("Name", "Sex", "Pop")
    name_data$Year = rep(year, dim(name_data)[1]) }
    else { # adding onto the very long dataframe
    name_data_new = read.csv(f, header=FALSE)
    names(name_data_new) = c("Name", "Sex", "Pop")
    name_data_new$Year = rep(year, dim(name_data_new)[1])
    name_data = rbind(name_data, name_data_new)
    }}
    year_pop_totals = ddply(name_data, .(Year), function (x) sum(x$Pop))
    name_data = merge(name_data, year_pop_totals, by.x="Year", by.y="Year", all.x=TRUE)
    name_data$Rel_Pop = name_data$Pop/name_data$V1
    estimate_age = function (input_name, sex = NA) {
    if (is.na(sex)) {
    name_subset = subset(name_data, Name == input_name & Year >= 1921)} #1921 is a year I chose arbitrarily. Change how you like.
    else {
    name_subset = subset(name_data, Name == input_name & Year >= 1921 & Sex == sex)
    }
    year_and_rel_pop = name_subset[which(name_subset$Rel_Pop == max(name_subset$Rel_Pop)),c(1,6)]
    current_year = as.numeric(substr(Sys.time(),1,4))
    estimated_age = current_year - as.numeric(year_and_rel_pop[1])
    return(list(year_of_birth=as.numeric(year_and_rel_pop[1]), age=estimated_age, relative_pop=sprintf("%1.2f%%",year_and_rel_pop[2]*100)))
    }
    view raw estimate_age.R hosted with ❤ by GitHub

    I’ll also accept any suggestions for cleaning up my code as is :)


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