acs14lite: A lightweight R interface to the 2010-2014 ACS API
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I use data from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey all of the time. I also use R all of the time. Naturally, this means that I often use ACS data in R – which is pertinent given last week’s release of the new 2010-2014 ACS estimates. I wanted easy access to the data to facilitate my on-going research on demographic trends in US metros, and work at the TCU Center for Urban Studies; as such, I wrote a small R package to provide quick access to the data, acs14lite (https://github.com/walkerke/acs14lite). This is not intended to be comparable to, or a replacement for, the existing ACS package in R; it is more for my personal convenience, but I thought it might be useful to others as well. This is mostly going to be a side project for me, so I don’t have plans for a CRAN submission at this time.
Install from GitHub with the following command in R:
devtools::install_github('walkerke/acs14lite')
Accessing the US Census Bureau’s API requires an API key, which you can get from here: http://api.census.gov/data/key_signup.html. You can then set it globally in your acs14lite session:
library(acs14lite) set_api_key('your API key here')
There is one main function in the package: acs14
. From here, you can request data for the following geographies: the entire US, regions, divisions, states, counties, Census tracts, and Census block groups. These are the geographies that I generally use, and I don’t have plans at the moment to add more; I would welcome pull requests, however.
The acs14
function has the following parameters:
api_key
: If you’ve set your API key already withset_api_key
, you don’t need to provide this.
geography
: One of ‘us’ (the default), ‘region’, ‘division’, ‘state’, ‘county’, ‘tract’, or ‘block group’.
variable
: A character string representing the Census variable name you want, or a vector of multiple variable names. Defaults to ‘B01001_001E’, which is total population. You can use the ACS package to look for variable names with itsacs.lookup
function; remember to addE
for estimate andM
for margin of error to the end of your variable name.
state
: The name of the state for which you want data; applicable to counties, tracts, and block groups.
county
: The name of the county for which you want data: applicable to tracts and block groups.
The function returns an R data frame with the data you want for your requested geography.
Additionally, I’ve written a few functions to help users work with margins of error in the ACS. Margins of error for the raw data are provided from the API; however, we often calculate new variables based on the ACS estimates, which in turn will have their own respective margins of error. I’ve used the guidelines in Appendix 3 here: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2008/acs/ACSGeneralHandbook.pdf to write the following functions:
moe_sum
: calculates a margin of error for a derived sum of ACS estimatesmoe_prop
: calculates a margin of error for a proportionmoe_ratio
: calculates a margin of error for a ratiomoe_product
: calculates a margin of error for a product
Below, I provide a couple examples of how you can use the package.
Interactive dot plot of income by county in Wyoming with Plotly
library(ggplot2) library(plotly) library(dplyr) wy_income <- acs14(geography = 'county', variable = c('B19013_001E', 'B19013_001M'), state = 'WY') wy2 <- wy_income %>% mutate(name = gsub(" County, Wyoming", "", wy_income$NAME), low = B19013_001E - B19013_001M, high = B19013_001E + B19013_001M) %>% select(name, low, high, estimate = B19013_001E) %>% arrange(desc(estimate)) g <- ggplot(wy2, aes(x = estimate, y = reorder(name, estimate))) + geom_point() + geom_errorbarh(aes(xmin = low, xmax = high)) + xlab("Median household income, 2010-2014 ACS estimate") + ylab("") ggplotly(g) %>% layout(margin = list(l = 120))
Interactive map of poverty in Los Angeles County by Census tract with CartoDB and the tigris package
library(tigris) library(CartoDB) # devtools::install_github("becarioprecario/cartodb-r/CartoDB", dep = TRUE) library(rgdal) la_poverty <- acs14(geography = 'tract', state = 'CA', county = 'Los Angeles', variable = c('B17001_001E', 'B17001_001M', 'B17001_002E', 'B17001_002M')) la2 <- la_poverty %>% mutate(geoid = paste0(state, county, tract), pctpov = round(100 * (B17001_002E / B17001_001E), 1), moepov = round(100 * (moe_prop(B17001_002E, B17001_001E, B17001_002M, B17001_001M)), 1)) %>% select(geoid, pctpov, moepov) cdb_name <- 'your CartoDB username here' cdb_key <- 'your CartoDB API key here' cartodb(cdb_name, cdb_key) la_tracts <- tracts('CA', 'Los Angeles', cb = TRUE) la_tracts2 <- geo_join(la_tracts, la2, "GEOID", "geoid") r2cartodb(la_tracts2, 'la_poverty') # Now, head to your CartoDB account to style your map!
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