“And as to me, I know nothing else but miracles” - Walt Whitman, probably talking about this package.

Iterative proportional fitting (raking) is a straightforward and fast way to generate weights which ensure a dataset reflects known target marginal distributions: put simply, survey professionals use raking to ensure that samples represent the population they are drawn from.

Existing R implementations of raking are frustrating to use, have antiquated syntax, require external dependencies or compilation, have inadequate documentation, generate difficult to understand errors, run slowly, and don’t support “tidy” workflows. autumn is a modern package built from the ground up to fix these problems.

autumn will be submitted to CRAN in January 2020 June 2020. In the meantime, you can install it using the following command:

# Install GitHub version:
devtools::install_github("aaronrudkin/autumn")

The workhorse function of autumn is harvest(), which takes at minimum two arguments: 1) a data.frame (or tibble) containing data; 2) target proportions. At its simplest, a call to harvest() works as follows:

# Standard R function call
harvest(respondent_data, ns_target)

# Using `magrittr`'s pipe operator
respondent_data %>% harvest(ns_target)

It just works! This function call will iteratively weight observations to match the target proportions and add a column weights to the data frame (it is also possible to rename the column or return the weights as a vector). Default parameters are helpful and sane: weights are guaranteed mean 1 and maximum 5.

The main challenge when running harvest() is to correctly specify target proportions. Two formats are supported: 1) a list of named vectors; 2) a data.frame or tibble.

When supplying targets as a list of named vectors, it looks like this:

list(
  gender = c(Male = 0.4829, Female = 0.5171), 
  region = c(Midwest = 0.2086, 
             Northeast = 0.1764, 
             South = 0.3775, 
             West = 0.2374)
)

Each list element should match the name of a single variable in the data, and each vector name should match a value the variable can take. The numeric values should be positive and sum to 1 within each variable.

When supplying data as a data.frame or tibble, the data.frame should have three columns (by default harvest() looks for columns named “variable”, “level”, and “proportion” – although these names can be overridden):

target_tbl
#> # A tibble: 6 x 3
#>   variable level     proportion
#>   <chr>    <chr>          <dbl>
#> 1 gender   Male           0.483
#> 2 gender   Female         0.517
#> 3 region   Midwest        0.209
#> 4 region   Northeast      0.176
#> 5 region   South          0.378
#> 6 region   West           0.237

autumn supports a variety of advanced features including:

• Supplying starting weights
• Adjusting maximum weights
• Adjusting convergence and iteration criteria
• Adjusting variable selection and error calculation criteria
• Handling missing data appropriately
• Calculating design effects for produced weights
• Summarizing raking results

Interested in doing something fancy? Check out our R vignettes for more details: TODO VIGNETTES GO HERE

How fast is autumn? Fast.

Below, we present results of three different benchmark scenarios, each using real data (the first two benchmarks use the respondent_data and ns_target datasets included with autumn). All of these benchmarks use identical data and default parameterizations, and were run on a low power 2016-vintage personal computer. The larger the the dataset and the more complicated the rake, the more you benefit from using autumn. Customizing convergence criteria to allow for earlier termination can result in further speed improvements over existing software.

Note:

This benchmark generates weights for a dataset of 6,691 observations, raking on 10 variables. Compared with the implementation in anesrake, autumn is about 67% faster and allocates one third less memory. Compared with the implementation in survey, autumn is about 4X as fast and allocates 20% more memory.

#> # A tibble: 3 x 6
#>   expression      min   median `itr/sec` mem_alloc `gc/sec`
#>   <chr>      <bch:tm> <bch:tm>     <dbl> <bch:byt>    <dbl>
#> 1 autumn        1.35s    1.73s     0.572  738.35MB    3.01 
#> 2 anesrake      2.46s    2.89s     0.315    1.11GB    2.42 
#> 3 survey        4.57s    6.76s     0.148  614.84MB    0.866

Consider a raking task that is more difficult to converge: the same dataset (6,691 observations) raked on 17 variables. The extra variables involve interactions which greatly complicate convergence. autumn is three times as fast as anesrake and uses almost two thirds less memory (survey will not complete the rake):

#> # A tibble: 2 x 6
#>   expression      min   median `itr/sec` mem_alloc `gc/sec`
#>   <chr>      <bch:tm> <bch:tm>     <dbl> <bch:byt>    <dbl>
#> 1 autumn         2.3s    3.02s    0.327     1.22GB     6.58
#> 2 anesrake      8.41s    9.99s    0.0945    3.11GB     4.77

Finally, consider an extremely resource intensive problem: raking a much larger dataset of 108,660 observations on 17 variables. In this scenario, autumn is 11 times faster and uses 92% less memory. (This benchmark is limited to 10 iterations):

#> # A tibble: 2 x 6
#>   expression      min   median `itr/sec` mem_alloc `gc/sec`
#>   <chr>      <bch:tm> <bch:tm>     <dbl> <bch:byt>    <dbl>
#> 1 autumn        47.1s    48.8s   0.0200     20.8GB     2.44
#> 2 anesrake      8.15m     8.8m   0.00189   238.6GB     2.52

autumn is written and maintained by Aaron Rudkin. Target proportions in the included ns_target data were developed by Alex Rossell-Hayes.

If you have any comments, issues, or concerns, please open a GitHub issue. Contributions are welcome. Please see our Contributor Code of Conduct for details.

autumn was developed in conjunction with Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, one of the largest public opinion surveys ever conducted. UCLA’s Nationscape team are: Tyler Reny, Alex Rossell-Hayes, Aaron Rudkin, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck. Funding for this project was provided by Democracy Fund, part of the Omidyar Group.

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