censusdis 0.7.1

US Census utilities for a variety of data loading and mapping purposes.

censusdis

Introduction

censusdis is a package for discovering, loading, analyzing, and computing diversity, integration, and segregation metrics to U.S. Census demographic data. It is designed to be intuitive and Pythonic, but give users access to the full collection of data and maps the US Census publishes via their APIs. Data and maps are returned in familiar Pandas and GeoPandas formats for easy integration with a wide variety of other Python data analysis, machine learning, and plotting tools.

Data Loading

The censusdis data loading capabilities have been tested extensively with data from the American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year data set. They also work well with other data sets available via the US Census API.

Maps

'censusdis' can also be used to load geographic data from the US Census for geospatial calculations. Maps for a variety of geographic features as described here can be downloaded and cached locally via Python APIs instead of by manual download from the US Census website.

Additionally, for plotting high quality maps, censusdis can download cartographic boundary file data. These are available at various resolutions and sometimes change from year to year. For example, here is what is available from the US Census for 2020.

Installation and Getting Started

censusdis can be installed in any python 3.9+ virtual environment using

pip install censusdis

From there, you can download your first data with something as simple as

import censusdis.data as ced

df_county_names = ced.download_detail(
    'acs/acs5',
    2020,
    ['NAME'],
    state="*",
    county="*"
)

This will return a dataframe of containing the names of all 3,221 counties in the United States as of 2020.

Of course, there is far more you can do with censusdis than this. We encourage you to check out the sample notebooks provided with the project for more complete examples.

Modules

The modules that make up the censusdis package are

Module	Description
censusdis.geography	Code for managing geography hierarchies in which census data is organized.
censusdis.data	Code for fetching data from the US Census API, including managing datasets, groups, and variable hierarchies.
censusdis.maps	Code for downloading map data from the US, caching it locally, and using it to render maps.
censusdis.states	Constants defining the US States. Used by the three other modules.

Demonstration Notebooks

There are several demonstration notebooks available to illustrate how censusdis can be used. They are found in the notebook directory of the source code.

The notebooks include

Notebook Name	Description
SoMa DIS Demo.ipynb	Load race and ethnicity data for two towns in Essex County, NJ and compute diversity and integration metrics.
ACS Demo.ipynb	Load American Community Survey (ACS) data for New Jersey and plot diversity statewide at the census block group level.
Seeing White.ipynb	Load nationwide demographic data at the county level and plot of map of the US showing the percent of the population who identify as white only (no other race) at the county level.
Map Demo.ipynb	Demonstrate loading at plotting maps of New Jersey at different geographic granularity.
Exploring Variables.ipynb	Load metatdata on a group of variables, visualize the tree hierarchy of variables in the group, and load data from the leaves of the tree.

Diversity and Integration Metrics

Diversity and integration metrics from the divintseg package are demonstrated in some notebooks.

For more information on these metrics see the divintseg project.