May News

Check out the new dplyr package for R and CPS Utilities ASEC from Unicon Research.

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May 2014

Data Manipulation in R Just Got Easier

Whether you're brand new to R or a long time user, you need to check out the new dplyr package, a package for fast and easy data manipulation. Released in January 2014, the dplyr package provides simple functions that can be chained together to easily and quickly manipulate data.

The idea behind dplyr is that data manipulation often involves common tasks, such as selecting certain variables, filtering on certain conditions, deriving new variables from existing variables, and so forth. If we think of these tasks as "verbs" we can define a grammar of sorts for data manipulation. In dplyr the main verbs (or functions) are filter, arrange, select, mutate, summarize, and group_by. You can probably guess what these functions do by their names, but let's describe them and try them out.

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CPS Utilities: Annual Social & Economic

The U.Va. Library recently purchased CPS Utilities Historical Series Complete: Annual Social & Economic (March) Supplement, 1962-2013 from Unicon Research.

The Current Population Survey (CPS) is administered monthly by the U.S. Census Bureau to over 65,000 households. It gathers a wealth of information on the education, labor force status, demographics, and other aspects of the U.S. population. The Annual Social & Economic Supplement collects additional information on work experience, income sources and amounts, non-cash benefits, health insurance, and migration.

CPS Utilities is an integrated set of tools to help researchers find variables of interests and extract their values from the CPS data files. The software enables users to locate relevant variables with relative ease, to produce data files by simply naming variables and years, to collect and view in compact form all coding and universe information for a variable across all survey years, and to ascertain easily the survey questions that led to the variable of interest.

U.Va. faculty, staff, and students can download CPS Utilities here. Log into NetBadge and download the zip file to install the software on a Windows computer, or burn the ISO file to a DVD. If you need assistance, please contact durrant@virginia.edu.

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