Survey analysis in R

A port of the package (version 3.6-8) to S-PLUS 8.0 is available from CSAN (thanks to Patrick Aboyoun at Insightful).

Features:

• Means, totals, ratios, quantiles, contingency tables, regression models, for the whole sample and for domains.
• Variances by Taylor linearization or by replicate weights (BRR, jackknife, bootstrap, or user-supplied)
• Multistage sampling with or without replacement.
• Post-stratification, generalized raking/calibration, GREG estimation.
• Two-phase designs. Estimated weights for augmented IPW estimators.
• Graphics

Comparison shopping:
Alan Zaslavsky keeps a comprehensive list of survey analysis software for the ASA Section on Survey Research Methods.

• Specifying a survey design
• Creating replicate weights
• Simple summary statistics
• Using supplied replicate weights
• Domain (subpopulation) estimation
• Tables of summary statistics
• Post-stratification and calibration
• Lonely PSUs
• Regression models
• Tests of association
• Stratification within PSUs
• Graphics
• Programming with survey objects

Some examples (in PDF) translated from Stata and SUDAAN examples at UCLA Academic Technology Services.

I gave a short course for the Washington Statistical Society on March 15-16 2007. The first day was on R and the slides are a selection from these. The second day was on the survey package, slides here.

I gave a talk on future directions for the survey package at useR 2007. This includes methods for handling large surveys by storing the data in a relational database. The surveyNG package provides a place to experiment on this sort of thing without breaking the current functionality. Note that 'surveyNG' is experimental: the interface is likely to change, and there are likely to be bugs. Feedback, especially on the design and on efficiency issues is still very welcome.

• Vignettes
• PDF from CRAN
• HTML