This is a growing library of helper tools for ingesting datasets from popular financial/economic sources via API
- US Census
- Federal Research Economic Data (FRED)
- Quandl (will add next)
Request an API key from census.gov to access the census API (https://api.census.gov/data/key_signup.html). Once you have your key, add CENSUS_KEY = to your .Renviron
Next, get your FRED API key to access Federal Research Economic Data API calls (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html). Once you have your key, add FRED_KEY = to your .Renviron
Also recommended to load the fips.Rdata set, which contains a vector of fips state codes, for easy reference
The US Census functions are designed to help with bulk download of multi-geographic census datasets. The getCensusInfo function is defaulted to help you identify the available geographies for the acs/acs5 (American Community Survey, 5-year rolling) datasets. Although, if you use the underlying censusapi package function listCensusMetadata, you can find the other available census surveys that can be used. Heavy emphasis on the fact that the batch processing functions concatCensusGroup and concatCensusVars are built based on the acs/acs5 dataset designs, and may not yet work with other survey types.
The concatCensusGroup allows you to grab all variables from a specified group (the census terminology for dataset). Groups are given ID's like B24022 (which corresponds with a specific concept, in this example, Sex by Occupation among workers over 16 years old). concatCensusVars on the other hand allows you to grab specific variables from the dataset that you can specify via input in comma separated fashion when prompted.
Check out the vignette.R file in the vignettes folder for a more complete look at how each of the Census and FRED api functions built here are used.