In jmcartiles/igebaser: Programmatic Access to Data from the IGE API

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Introduction

The Galician Statistics Institute (Instituto Galego de Estatística, IGE) is an autonomous body of the Xunta de Galicia created in 1988 and which is governed basically by Law 9/1988 on Statistics of Galicia. In its mission to promote the development of the statistical system of the Autonomous Community must provide services of collection and dissemination of available statistical documentation, develop databases of public interest, analyze the needs and evolution of the demand for statistics and ensure their dissemination.

igebaser

The goal of the igebaser R-package is to provide a bridge between these alternatives and allow researchers to focus on their research questions and not the question of accessing the data. The igebaser R-package allows researchers to quickly search and download the data of their particular interest in a programmatic and reproducible fashion; this facilitates a seamless integration into their workflow and allows analysis to be quickly rerun on different areas of interest and with realtime access to the latest available data.

Installation

You can download the released version of igebaser from Github with:

# devtools::install_github("jmcartiles/igebaser")

Highlighted features of the igebaser R-package:

• Access to all data available in the API
• Support for searching and downloading data
• Ability to return POSIXct dates for easy integration into plotting and time-series analysis techniques
• Support for grep style searching for data descriptions and names

Getting Started

The first step would be searching for the data you are interested in. igebase_search() provides grep style searching of all available indicators from the IGE API and returns the indicator information that matches your query.

Finding available data with cache

For performance and ease of use, a cached version of useful information is provided with the igebaser R-package. This data is called cache and provides a snapshot of available indicators, and other relevant information. cache is by default the the source from which igebase_search() and igebase() uses to find matching information. The structure of cache is as follows

library(igebaser)
str(igebaser::cache)

Search available data with igebase_search()

igebase_search() searches through the cache data frame to find indicators that match a search pattern. An example of the structure of this data frame is below

knitr::kable(head(igebaser::cache[4310:4311, ]))

By default the search is done over the label field and returns the ID and the label. To return all the columns of the matching rows you can set extra = TRUE.

library(igebaser)
busqueda <- igebase_search(pattern = "parado")
head(busqueda)

Other fields can be searched by simply changing the fields parameter. For example

library(igebaser)
padron_busqueda <- igebase_search(pattern = "INE. Padrón continuo", fields = "source", extra = TRUE)
head(padron_busqueda)

Regular expressions are also supported.

library(igebaser)
# 'pobreza' OR 'parados' OR 'trabajador'
popatr_busqueda <- igebase_search(pattern = "pobreza|parados|trabajador", extra = TRUE)
head(popatr_busqueda)

Downloading data with igebase()

Once you have found the set of indicators that you would like to explore further, the next step is downloading the data with igebase(). The following examples are meant to highlight the different ways in which igebase() can be used and demonstrate the major optional parameters.

library(igebaser)
padron_data <- igebase(igebase_ID = 589)
head(padron_data)

If you are interested in only some subset of regions you can pass along the specific region to the region parameter.

library(igebaser)
padron_data_galicia <- igebase(igebase_ID = 589, region = "Galicia")
head(padron_data_galicia)

Using POSIXct = TRUE

The default format for the tempo column is not conducive to sorting or plotting, especially when downloading sub annual data, such as monthly or quarterly data. To address this, if TRUE, the POSIXct parameter adds the additional columns periodo and periodicidade. periodo converts the default date into a POSIXct. periodicidade denotes the time resolution that the date represents. If POSIXct = TRUE is not available, a warning is produced and the option is ignored.

startdate and enddate must be in the format yyyy-mm-dd.

library(igebaser)
padron_data_galicia <- igebase(igebase_ID = 589, region = "Galicia", POSIXct = TRUE, startdate = "2000-01-01", enddate = "2018-12-01")
head(padron_data_galicia)

The POSIXct = TRUE option makes plotting and sorting dates much easier.

library(igebaser)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
padron_data_galicia <- igebase(igebase_ID = 589, region = "Galicia", POSIXct = TRUE, startdate = "2000-01-01", enddate = "2018-12-01") %>%
  filter(sexo != "Total")
ggplot(padron_data_galicia, aes(x = periodo, y = daton, color = sexo)) +
  geom_line() +
  geom_point() +
  theme(panel.background = element_blank())

Using freq

If the data has several granularity, you can select some of them with the parameter freq. Possible values are: anual,trimestral,mensual.

library(igebaser)
clima_data <- igebase(1651, POSIXct = TRUE, label = TRUE, freq = "anual", show_metadata = TRUE)
head(clima_data)

jmcartiles/igebaser documentation built on May 10, 2019, 2:44 p.m.