An R package providing infrastructure for writing X-13 stories, essentially R Markdown documents that describe various aspects of seasonal adjustment with X-13ARIMA-SEATS.
The package allows you to render an X-13 story (example) as:
-
a nicely formated PDF (example)
-
or as an online story that can be manipulated interactively, see screenshot).
We see both static PDFs and interactive online stories as part of an ideal workflow that simplifies discussions on seasonal adjustment. A preliminary draft of the vignette describes the workflow in more detail.
As the package is not yet on CRAN, it needs to be installed from GitHub:
library(devtools) # if you don't have devtools: install.packages("devtools")
install_github("christophsax/x13story")
The x13story package depends on the R package seasonal, which interfaces to X-13ARIMA-SEATS. If you install x13story, seasonal and the X-13ARIMA-SEATS binaries (through x13binary) are installed automatically.
In newer versions of RStudio, you can select the R Makrdown template from the menu:
New Document Symbol > R Markdown ... > From Template > X-13 Handout
If you are using R from another environment, use:
rmarkdown::draft("MyArticle.Rmd", template = "x13story", package = "x13story")
To generate a PDF, you can use the knitr button in RStudio, or run knitr from the console.
To generate an interactive story, use the view function from the
seasonalview package. The function accepts a local or a remote file path, so the
following downloads an X-13 story from the Internet and interactively displays
it in the browser:
library(seasonalview)
view(story = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/christophsax/x13story/master/inst/stories/x11.Rmd")
As we argue in the vignette, R offers the single most convenient way to discuss and exchange seasonal adjustment problems, as it relies on free open source tools that can be installed anywhere with a single line of code (see above).
For sharing, the view function allows you to interactively inspect X-13
stories anywhere on the web. For example, you can put it to
GitHub Gist and make the link available to anyone you
want, even without setting up an account.
We intend to collect stories on X-13ARIMA-SEATS in the x13story package and
make them interactively available
online. X-13 stories are
currently kept in
inst/stories.
Stories are rendered automatically both as
interactive views and as PDFs.
This is work in progress. We greatly appreciate feedback and contributions of X-13 stories, even when they are still edgy.
James Livsey (United States Census Bureau) and Christoph Sax (University of Basel)
GPL-3