chensus

Overview

chensus is an R package for estimating populations from surveys conducted by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO), specifically:

• structural survey: Strukturerhebung (SE) / relevé structurel (RS),
• mobility and transport survey: Mikrozensus Mobilität und Verkehr (MZMV) / Microrecensement mobilité et transports (MRMT).

It implements closed-form formulas for confidence intervals as described in the FSO’s methodological reports for the structural survey and mobility and transport survey. For mathematical details, see the Method vignette.

chensus provides a consistent set of tidyverse-based tools to analyse the data of structural and mobility and transport surveys:

• se_total() estimates population totals in the structural surveys
• se_mean() estimates means of continuous variables in the structural survey
• se_prop() estimates population proportions in the structural survey
• mzmv_mean() estimates proportions and means in the mobility and transport survey.

Installation

You can install the development version from GitHub with:

remotes::install_github("afds-bl/chensus")

Usage

Refer to the package vignette for detailed examples and use cases.

Structural survey

Estimate total population by gender:

library(chensus)

se_total(
  data = nhanes,
  gender,
  weight = weights,
  strata = strata
)
# A tibble: 2 × 9
  gender   occ      total    vhat stand_dev       ci ci_per       ci_l      ci_u
  <chr>  <int>      <dbl>   <dbl>     <dbl>    <dbl>  <dbl>      <dbl>     <dbl>
1 Female  5079 161922446. 7.82e12  2795884. 5479833.   3.38 156442613.    1.67e8
2 Male    4892 154558598. 7.90e12  2810039. 5507576.   3.56 149051022.    1.60e8

Estimate mean household size (numeric variable):

se_mean(
  data = nhanes,
  variable = household_size,
  weight = weights,
  strata = strata
)
# A tibble: 1 × 7
    occ household_size     vhat stand_dev     ci  ci_l  ci_u
  <int>          <dbl>    <dbl>     <dbl>  <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1  9971           3.46 0.000495    0.0222 0.0436  3.42  3.51

Estimate population proportions by gender (categorical variable):

se_prop(
  data = nhanes,
  gender,
  weight = weights,
  strata = strata
)
# A tibble: 2 × 8
  gender   occ  prop      vhat stand_dev     ci  ci_l  ci_u
  <chr>  <int> <dbl>     <dbl>     <dbl>  <dbl> <dbl> <dbl>
1 Female  5079 0.512 0.0000520   0.00721 0.0141 0.498 0.526
2 Male    4892 0.488 0.0000520   0.00721 0.0141 0.474 0.502

Mobility and Transport Survey

Estimate mean annual household and family incomes:

mzmv_mean(
  data = nhanes,
  annual_household_income, annual_family_income,
  weight = weights
)
# A tibble: 2 × 4
  variable                  occ wmean    ci
  <chr>                   <int> <dbl> <dbl>
1 annual_household_income  9626  11.9 0.240
2 annual_family_income     9642  11.5 0.245

Estimate mean annual household and family incomes by gender:

mzmv_mean_map(
  data = nhanes,
  variable = c("annual_household_income", "annual_family_income"),
  gender,
  weight = weights
)
# A tibble: 4 × 6
  variable                group_vars group_vars_value   occ wmean    ci
  <chr>                   <chr>      <fct>            <int> <dbl> <dbl>
1 annual_household_income gender     Female            4906  11.8 0.350
2 annual_household_income gender     Male              4720  12.0 0.328
3 annual_family_income    gender     Female            4917  11.5 0.358
4 annual_family_income    gender     Male              4725  11.6 0.334

Documentation

The package includes the following vignettes:

• chensus gives detailed examples of how to use the package.
• Method details the mathematical background of the confidence interval estimates.
• nhanes inspects the example data set.

License

Distributed under the GPL-3 License. See LICENSE for more information.

Contact

Souad Guemghar

Amt für Daten und Statistik, Basel-Landschaft.

Acknowledgments

This package is an extension of vhatbfs by Sandro Burri, which estimates the confidence intervals of totals for the structural survey. Many thanks to Sandro for the foundational work and support.

This package uses data derived from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), provided by the CDC/NCHS and available at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nhanes/. Data are adapted for educational or demonstration purposes and are not suitable for research unless downloaded directly from the official source.

Citation

utils::citation("chensus")

To cite 'chensus' in publications, please use:

  Guemghar, S. (2025). chensus: Estimate Totals, Means, Proportions and
  Confidence Intervals of the Federal Statistic Office's Surveys. R
  package version 2.0.0. Amt für Daten und Statistik, Basel-Landschaft.
  https://github.com/afds-bl/chensus

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {{chensus}: Estimate Totals, Means, Proportions and Confidence Intervals of
the Federal Statistic Office's Surveys},
    author = {{Guemghar} and {S.}},
    organization = {Amt für Daten und Statistik, Basel-Landschaft},
    note = {R package version 2.0.0},
    year = {2025},
    url = {https://github.com/afds-bl/chensus},
  }

Code of Conduct

The chensus project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.