Read demographic data and construct demogdata object

Read data from text files and construct a demogdata object suitable for plotting using plot.demogdata and fitting an LC or BMS model using lca or an FDA model using fdm.

Usage

read.demogdata(
  file,
  popfile,
  type,
  label,
  max.mx = 10,
  skip = 2,
  popskip = skip,
  lambda,
  scale = 1
)

Arguments

file: Filename containing demographic rates.
popfile: Filename containing population numbers.
type: Character string showing type of demographic series: either “mortality”, “fertility” or “migration”.
label: Name of area from which the data are taken.
max.mx: Maximum allowable value for demographic rate. All values greater than max.mx will be set to max.mx.
skip: Number of lines to skip at the start of file.
popskip: Number of lines to skip at the start of popfile.
lambda: Box-Cox transformation parameter to be used in modelling and plotting. If missing, default values are 0 (for mortality), 0.4 (for fertility) and 1 (for migration).
scale: Number of people in the rate definition. scale=1 indicates the rates are per person; scale=1000 indicates the rates are per 1000 people.

Value

Object of class “demogdata” with the following components:

year: Vector of years
age: Vector of ages
rate: A list containing one or more rate matrices with one age group per row and one column per year.
pop: A list of the same form as rate but containing population numbers instead of demographic rates.
type: Type of object: “mortality”, “fertility” or “migration”.
label: label

Details

All data are assumed to be tab-delimited text files with the first column containing the year of observation and the second column containing the age level. All remaining columns are assumed to be demographic rates for sections of the population. The first row of the text file is assumed to contain the names of each column. Population data are assumed to have the same format but with population numbers in place of rates. The columns names in the two files should be identical. Note that this format is what is used by the Human Mortality Database http://www.mortality.org. If popfile contains the Exposures and file contains the Mx rates from the HMD, then everything will work seamlessly.

Author

Rob J Hyndman

Examples


  if (FALSE) norway <- read.demogdata("Mx_1x1.txt",
  "Exposures_1x1.txt", type="mortality", label="Norway") # \dontrun{}