The censusxy package is designed to provide easy access to the U.S.
Census Bureau Geocoding
Tools in R. censusxy
has also been developed specifically with large data sets in mind - only
unique addresses are passed to the API for geocoding. If a data set
exceeds 1,000 unique addresses, it will be automatically subset into
appropriately sized API calls, geocoded, and then put back together so
that a single object is returned. There is also support for parallel
processing of requests, which can significantly shorten the time it
takes to batch geocode large numbers of addresses.
censusxy is described in a 2021 paper in Transactions in
GIS by
Chris and Branson - please cite the paper if you use censusxy in your
work!
The easiest way to get censusxy is to install it from CRAN:
install.packages("censusxy")Alternatively, the development version of censusxy can be accessed
from GitHub with remotes:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("chris-prener/censusxy")Since the package does not need sf for its basic functionality, it is
a suggested dependency rather than a required one. However, many users
will want to map these data as sf objects, and we therefore recommend
users install sf. Windows and macOS users should be able to install
sf without significant issues unless they are building from source.
Linux users will need to install several open source spatial libraries
to get sf itself up and running.
If you want to use these sf, you can either install it individually
(faster) or install all of the suggested dependencies at once (slower,
will also give you a number of other packages you may or may not want):
## install sf only
install.packages("sf")
## install all suggested dependencies
install.packages("censusxy", dependencies = TRUE)The censusxy package contains two data sets, stl_homicides (n =
1,812) and stl_homicides_small (n = 24), that can be used to
demonstrate the functionality of the package. The stl_homicides_small
data is included specifically for quick experimentation, as its small
sample size ensures an expedient response from the API.
To test censusxy’s functionality, load the package and either of the
sample data sets:
library(censusxy)
data <- stl_homicidesThere are two possible variable configurations (simple and full,
specified using the output argument), and two possible output class
types (dataframe and sf, specified using the class argument):
homicide_sf <- cxy_geocode(data, street = "street_address", city = "city", state = "state",
output = "simple", class = "sf")If you request an sf object, you easily preview the results with the
mapview package:
> mapview::mapview(homicide_sf)
Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.