Closed ar-puuk closed 4 months ago
Thank you for your kind words, and your suggestion! This is not something I plan to implement. It is a core part of the design philosophy of tidycensus that margins of error should always be returned alongside their estimates, as the uncertainty around those estimates is important for users to understand.
First of all, huge thanks to this package and the contributors. This has made my life so easy in terms of downloading the census and the acs geospatial data.
Description
The following is my workflow when I work with ACS data. While I understand the importance of the Margin of Error columns, I have never had to work with it. So, I end up removing them directly. I wonder if it is possible to modify the
get_acs()
function to not fetch or remove the Margin of Error columns.Requested Feature
Option 1
If the function could be updated such that it takes variable names followed by 'E' or 'M', it would only download the Estimates or Margin of Errors respectively. If the variable names do not contain 'E' or 'M' then both Estimate and Margin of Error columns would be downloaded as it is right now.
Option 2
Add a
fetch_moe
argument within theget_acs()
function, which ifTRUE
will download the variables with 'E' and 'M' suffixed after the variable names for Estimate and Margin of Error respectively. If the argument is set toFALSE
then fetch just the estimates and don't add a suffix to the variable name.I understand that it is just two extra lines I need to add every time I have to use
get_acs()
, but I think it would be helpful to have this feature bundled with the function.