How to make maps with Census data in R

US Census Data

The US Census collects a number of demographic measures and publishes aggregate data through its website. There are several ways to use Census data in R, from the Census API to the USCensus2010 package. If you are interested in geopolitical data in the US, I recommend exploring both these options - the Census API requires a key for each person who uses it, and the package requires downloading a very large dataset. The setups for both require some effort, but once that effort is done you don’t have to do it again.

The acs package in R allows you to access the Census API easily. I highly recommend checking it out, and that’s the method we will use here. Note that I’ve already defined the variable api_key - if you are trying to run this code you will need to first run something like api_key <- <enter your Census API key> before running the rest of this code.

library(acs)
api.key.install(key=api_key) # now you are ready to run the rest of the acs code

For purposes here, we will use the toy example of plotting median household income by county for every county in South Carolina. First, we obtain the Census data. The first command gives us the table and variable names of what we want. I then use that table number in the acs.fetch command to get the variable I want.

acs.lookup(endyear=2015, span=5,dataset="acs", keyword= c("median","income","family","total"), case.sensitive=F)
## Warning in acs.lookup(endyear = 2015, span = 5, dataset = "acs", keyword = c("median", : XML variable lookup tables for this request
##   seem to be missing from ' https://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5/variables.xml ';
##   temporarily downloading and using archived copies instead;
##   since this is *much* slower, recommend running
##   acs.tables.install()
## An object of class "acs.lookup"
## endyear= 2015  ; span= 5 
## 
## results:
##    variable.code table.number
## 1     B10010_001       B10010
## 2     B19126_001       B19126
## 3     B19126_002       B19126
## 4     B19126_005       B19126
## 5     B19126_006       B19126
## 6     B19126_009       B19126
## 7     B19215_001       B19215
## 8     B19215_002       B19215
## 9     B19215_003       B19215
## 10    B19215_006       B19215
## 11    B19215_009       B19215
## 12    B19215_010       B19215
## 13    B19215_013       B19215
##                                                                                                                                                          table.name
## 1                                                                  Median Family Income for Families with GrndPrnt Householders Living With Own GrndChldrn < 18 Yrs
## 2                 B19126. Median Family Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Family Type by Presence of Own Children Under 18 Years
## 3                 B19126. Median Family Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Family Type by Presence of Own Children Under 18 Years
## 4                 B19126. Median Family Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Family Type by Presence of Own Children Under 18 Years
## 5                 B19126. Median Family Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Family Type by Presence of Own Children Under 18 Years
## 6                 B19126. Median Family Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Family Type by Presence of Own Children Under 18 Years
## 7  B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
## 8  B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
## 9  B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
## 10 B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
## 11 B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
## 12 B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
## 13 B19215. Median Nonfamily Household Income in the Past 12 Months (in 2015 Inflation-Adjusted Dollars) by Sex of Householder by Living Alone by Age of Householder
##                                                                                                                                                variable.name
## 1                                                                                                        Median family income in the past 12 months-- Total:
## 2                                                                  Median family income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Total:
## 3                                          Median family income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Married-couple family -- Total
## 4                                                   Median family income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Other family -- Total
## 5              Median family income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Other family -- Male householder, no wife present -- Total
## 6         Median family income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Other family -- Female householder, no husband present -- Total
## 7                                           Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Total (dollars):
## 8                        Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Male householder -- Total (dollars)
## 9        Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Male householder -- Living alone -- Total (dollars)
## 10   Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Male householder -- Not living alone -- Total (dollars)
## 11                     Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Female householder -- Total (dollars)
## 12     Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Female householder -- Living alone -- Total (dollars)
## 13 Median nonfamily household income in the past 12 months (in 2015 Inflation-adjusted dollars) -- Female householder -- Not living alone -- Total (dollars)
my_cnty <- geo.make(state = 45,county = "*")
home_median_price<-acs.fetch(geography=my_cnty, table.number="B19126",endyear=2015) # home median prices
## Warning in (function (endyear, span = 5, dataset = "acs", keyword, table.name, : XML variable lookup tables for this request
##   seem to be missing from ' https://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5/variables.xml ';
##   temporarily downloading and using archived copies instead;
##   since this is *much* slower, recommend running
##   acs.tables.install()
## Error in if (url.test["statusMessage"] != "OK") {: missing value where TRUE/FALSE needed
knitr::kable(head(home_median_price@estimate))
  B19126_001 B19126_002 B19126_003 B19126_004 B19126_005 B19126_006 B19126_007 B19126_008 B19126_009 B19126_010 B19126_011
Abbeville County, South Carolina 44918 55141 65664 50698 24835 43187 50347 24886 22945 18101 29958
Aiken County, South Carolina 57396 70829 72930 70446 29302 36571 35469 37906 27355 22760 34427
Allendale County, South Carolina NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
Anderson County, South Carolina 53169 65881 75444 60166 26608 36694 37254 36297 24384 17835 29280
Bamberg County, South Carolina NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA
Barnwell County, South Carolina 44224 59467 70542 54030 19864 25143 18633 45714 18317 13827 21315

Plotting the map data

If you have the maps and ggplot2 packages, you already have the data you need to plot. We use the map_data function from ggplot2 to pull in county shape data for South Carolina. (A previous attempt at this blogpost had used the ggmap package, but there is an incompatibility between that and the latest ggplot2 package at the time of this writing.)

library(ggplot2)
## Want to understand how all the pieces fit together? Buy the
## ggplot2 book: http://ggplot2.org/book/
sc_map <- map_data("county",region="south.carolina")
ggplot() + geom_polygon(aes(x=long,y=lat,group=group),data=sc_map,colour="white",fill="black") + theme_minimal()

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-1

Merging the demographic and map data

Now we have the demographic data and the map, but merging the two will take a little effort. The reason is that the map data gives a lower case representation of the county and calls it a “subregion”, while the Census data returns the county as “xxxx County, South Carolina”. I use the dplyr and stringr packages (for str_replace) to make short work of this merge.

library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
 
merged <- as.data.frame(home_median_price@estimate) %>% 
  mutate(county_full = rownames(.),
         county = str_replace(county_full,"(.+) County.*","\\1") %>% tolower) %>% 
  select(county,B19126_001) %>% 
  rename(med_income=B19126_001) %>% 
  right_join(sc_map,by=c("county"="subregion"))
 
knitr::kable(head(merged,10))
county med_income long lat group order region
abbeville 44918 -82.24809 34.41758 1 1 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.31685 34.35455 1 2 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.31111 34.33163 1 3 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.31111 34.29152 1 4 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.28247 34.26860 1 5 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.25955 34.25142 1 6 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.24809 34.21131 1 7 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.23663 34.18266 1 8 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.24236 34.15401 1 9 south carolina
abbeville 44918 -82.27674 34.10818 1 10 south carolina

It’s now a simple matter to plot this merged dataset. In fact, we only have to tweak a few things from the first time we plotted the map data.

ggplot() + geom_polygon(aes(x=long,y=lat,group=group,fill=med_income),data=merged) + theme_minimal()

plot of chunk unnamed-chunk-3

Discussion

It’s pretty easy to plot U.S. Census data on a map. The real power of Census data comes not just from plotting it, but combining with other geographically-based data (such as crime). The acs package in R makes it easy to obtain Census data, which can then be merged with other data using packages such as dplyr and stringr and then plotted with ggplot2. Hopefully the authors of the ggmap and ggplot2 packages can work out their incompatibilities so that the above maps can be created using the Google API map or open street maps.

It should be noted that while I obtained county-level information, aggregate data can be obtained at Census block and tract levels as well, if you are looking to do some sort of localized analysis.

Written on July 21, 2017