This weekend I released version 0.3.0 of the Icarus package to CRAN.

Icarus provides tools to help perform calibration on margins, which is a very important method in sampling. One of these days I’ll write a blog post explaining calibration on margins! In the meantime if you want to learn more, you can read our course on calibration (in French) or the original paper of Deville and Sarndal (1992). Shortly said, calibration computes new sampling weights so that the sampling estimates match totals we already know thanks to another source (census, typically).

In the industry, one of the most widely used software for performing calibration on margins is the SAS macro Calmar developed at INSEE. Icarus is designed with the typical Calmar user in mind if s/he whishes to find a direct equivalent in R. The format expected by Icarus for the margins and the variables is directly inspired by Calmar’s (wiki and example here). Icarus also provides the same kind of graphs and stats aimed at helping statisticians understand the quality of their data and estimates (especially on domains), and in general be able to understand and explain the reweighting process.

I hope I find soon the time to finish a full well documented article to submit to a journal and set it as a vignette on CRAN. For now, here are the slides (in French, again) I presented at the “colloque francophone sondages” in Gatineau last october: http://nc233.com/icarus.

Kudos to the CRAN team for their amazing work!