datadesk/census-data-downloader

Add margin of error fields to ACS downloads

palewire opened this issue · 2 comments

Add margin of error fields to ACS downloads

It's important to note that MoE data can't be added together in the same way that you add together the estimates. Some more info in this PDF: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/training-presentations/20180418_MOE.pdf

There are certainly multiple different ways to implement this feature.

My hope is that we can do it "magically" by inferring the companion margin of error field for each value field included in the keys of the RAW_FIELD_CROSSWALK on our table configuration classes.

I suspect such a feature could be combined with the get_api_fields method on the BaseGeoTypeDownloader class to append all of the margin fields to each raw data download from the census API.

Those raw values could then by appended to the processed files with their headers renamed by appending "_moe" to the clean names provided by the values in RAW_FIELD_CROSSWALK.

I believe that could be done by expanding the raw_field_mapper section of the process method on the same base geotype class.