Articles

All vignettes

Getting started with the cansim package

This vignette provides an overview of the cansim package, including how to install it, how to retrieve data from Statistics Canada’s NDM, and how to work with the data.

Listing Statistics Canada data tables

Data discovery and pinpointing the best data to use is an important and often challenging aspect of analysis. The package offers several methods to programmatically search through data available via the StatCan NDM.

Partial table data download

Data tables can be quite large, in many applications it makes sense to only download a small subset of a table. The package can create a synthetic template table containing all possible combinations of categories in each dimension that can be used for filtering and pinpointing data of interest, and then downloading just that data instead of the entire table.

Retrieving individual Statistics Canada vectors

The cansim package provides functionality to retrieve individual Statistics Canada vectors or access data by table and coordinate, which are often used for specific time series data and is generally faster than downloading entire tables.

Working with Statistics Canada data table object hierarchies

Statistics Canada data tables comes with rich metadata, including on the hierarchy of categories in each dimension. The packages incorporates this metadata and allows for selecting data by hierarchy level.

Working with large tables

Very large StatCan tables can pose challenges for memory footprint and performace. We show how to overcome these challenges by accessing the data through a parquet or SQLite database connection.