pipewelder

pipewelder is an R package for streamlined retrieval and cleaning of economic and public health time series data from:

• Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
• Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

It provides two layers of functionality:

• The get_*() functions retrieve data for a single series ID from each respective source.
• The construct_*() functions operate on a named list of series metadata tibbles (such as those returned by get_full_gsheet()), iterating over each entry to retrieve and clean data for multiple series at once.

The output is a named list of tibbles, where each tibble represents a cleaned time series. Instead of inserting the series ID as a column, each tibble is tagged using attr(x, "series_id") to preserve the series identifier without modifying the data structure.

Functions included:

• get_bls() retrieves BLS labor force data
• get_fred() retrieves FRED macroeconomic indicators
• get_cdc() retrieves CDC mortality and health surveillance data
• construct_bls() builds cleaned BLS data from a list of series metadata
• construct_fred() builds cleaned FRED data from a list of series metadata
• construct_cdc() builds cleaned CDC data from a list of metadata tabs, auto-detecting schema structure

Every construct_*() function has a caching mechanism which caches the retrieved data to ~\pipewelder-cache. The cache can be flushed with the flush = TRUE parameter but should retrieve fresh data once each calendar day. All construct_*() functions also include default date parameters, which differ by source. Be sure to review the documentation to understand the behavior for each.

Installation

You can install pipewelder from GitHub with:

install.packages("pak") # Install 'pak' if not present
pak::pak("leg3/pipewelder")

Examples

Retrieve a Google sheet to use as a input for the construct_*() functions:

url <- "https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/your-sheet-id/edit#gid=0"
sheet <- get_full_gsheet(url)

Retrieve series data from BLS:

# Set your API key
Sys.setenv(BLS_KEY = "your_api_key")

# Retrieve a single series of BLS data from 2000 to 2023
bls_df <- get_bls("LNS14000000", 2000, 2023)

# Construct a list of tibbles using a Google Sheet as input
BLS <- construct_bls(sheet)

Retrieve series data from FRED

# Set your API key
Sys.setenv(FRED_KEY = "your_api_key")

# Retrieve a single series of FRED data from 1990 to the present
fred_df <- get_fred("VIXCLS", "1990-01-01")

# Construct a list of tibbles using a Google Sheet as input
FRED <- construct_fred(sheet)

Retrieve series data from CDC

# Retrieve a single series of CDC data with date defaults
cdc_df <- get_cdc("9j2v-jamp")

# Construct a list of tibbles using a Google Sheet as input
CDC <- construct_cdc(sheet)

License

This project is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Commercial use is not permitted without separate permission from Leg3 Inc. See LICENSE for details.

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