CityState

I’m happy to report that I’ll be giving a paper on my acs package at the 8th annual useR! conference, Coming June 12-15^th to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. The paper is titled “Estimates with Errors and Errors with Estimates: Using the R acs Package for Analysis of American Community Survey Data.” Here’s the abstract:

"Estimates with Errors and Errors with Estimates: Using the R acs
Package for Analysis of American Community Survey Data"
Ezra Haber Glenn

Over the past decade, the U.S. Census Bureau has implemented the
American Community Survey (ACS) as a replacement for its traditional
decennial ``long-form'' survey.  Last year—for the first time
ever—ACS data was made available at the census tract and block group
level for the entire nation, representing geographies small enough to
be useful to local planners; in the future these estimates will be
updated on a yearly basis, providing much more current data than was
ever available in the past.  Although the ACS represents a bold
strategy with great promise for government planners, policy-makers,
and other advocates working at the neighborhood scale, it will require
them to become comfortable with statistical techniques and concerns
that they have traditionally been able to avoid.

To help with this challenge the author has been working with
local-level planners to determine the most common problems associated
with using ACS data, and has implemented these functions as a package
in R.  The package—currently hosted on CRAN in version 0.8—defines
a new ``acs'' class object (containing estimates, standard errors, and
metadata for tables from the ACS), with methods to deal appropriately
with common tasks (e.g., combining subgroups or geographies,
mathematical operations on estimates, tests of significance, plots of
confidence intervals, etc.).

This paper will present both the use and the internal structure of the
package, with discussion of additional lines of development.

Hope to see you all there!