births: US Birth Record Data
In Mikuana/vitalstatistics: CDC Vital Statistics Analysis Tools

Description Details Value Conceptual Prefixes Fields Source

This is the primary analytic data set that included and used by this package. This data frame is the result of the raw data processing that is applied to birth certificate data sets provided by the CDC.

We include a description of each field in this data set, since they are the result of a quite complicated process which blends data from 50 years of distinct data sets with different field values and usages throughout that time.

an object of class data.table

Each field is named with a conceptual prefix in order to make its meaning more clear intuitive. This is useful to delineate fields that might be confusing, such as date of birth. If we were to simply use "date" as our field name, it leaves some question as to whether this is the date of birth, date of conception, date of reporting, etc. Instead, we use one of a defined set of words as the first word in every field to make the meaning clear.

birth: fields prefixed with "birth_" describe values relative to the delivery event. For example, the "birth_hour" is intended to be the time when the delivery was completed, and "birth_in_hospital" refers to whether the final moment of the delivery occured in the hospital, regardless of the length of time that might have been spent in labor outside the hospital.

mother: the mother is the primary subject addressed by this data set. Unless otherwise stated in the field definition, all dependent attributes of the mother should be considered in the context of the birth. For example, the age of the mother calculated at the time of the birth, her state of residence at the time of the birth, and so forth.

child: the child (i.e. newly born infant) is the secondary subject addressed by this data set.

birth_month_date
birth_weekday_date
birth_state
birth_in_hospital
birth_via_cesarean
mother_age
child_sex ...
cases ...

cases: an integer representing the number of birth records that are represented by the combination of dimensions that are present in a particular record of the births data set. All math that is performed on this data set should be weighted by this value.

CDC and this package

Mikuana/vitalstatistics documentation built on May 7, 2019, 4:57 p.m.