I’m happy to report that I’ll be giving a paper on my acs package at the 8th annual useR! conference, Coming June 12-15th 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!
