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API returns value of -666666666 #72

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jeancochrane opened this issue Apr 4, 2019 · 7 comments · May be fixed by #75
Open

API returns value of -666666666 #72

jeancochrane opened this issue Apr 4, 2019 · 7 comments · May be fixed by #75

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@jeancochrane
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Some calls to acs5.state_county_tract() return the value -666666666. This seems like a semantically significant value, but I can't find documentation on what it means.

For a reproducible example, this call returns the value in question:

>>> c = Census(os.environ['CENSUS_API_KEY'], year=2016)
>>> c.acs5.state_county_tract('B19081_001E', 42, 101, '989100')

[{'B19081_001E': -666666666.0, 'state': '42', 'county': '101', 'tract': '989100'}]

Any thoughts on what this response means, and how I should handle it? So far I've just been converting them to nulls.
@jeancochrane jeancochrane mentioned this issue Apr 4, 2019
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@loganpowell
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Here are those definitions:

https://www.census.gov/data/developers/data-sets/acs-1year/notes-on-acs-estimate-and-annotation-values.html

@jeancochrane
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Exactly what I was looking for, thanks @loganpowell!

@fgregg fgregg reopened this Apr 8, 2019
@jeancochrane
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How do you think the library should handle this response @fgregg? I'm happy to give a PR a shot if you can provide guidance.

@fgregg
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fgregg commented Apr 8, 2019

I think it would be good to configure the library to do two things based on a user setting.

  1. cast these to null, and emit a warning
  2. raise an exception

Not sure what the default should be? Thoughts?

@jeancochrane
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My reading of the docs is that this value means one of either:

  1. No data
  2. Not enough data to make an estimate
  3. Ratio of medians could not be calculated (?)

I don't feel confident I understand what's going on with 3), but 1) and 2) both indicate to me that casting to null and raising a warning would be a good default, since null is a common interpretation of "no data".

@fgregg
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fgregg commented Apr 8, 2019

casting to null and raising a warning is probably a bit more backwards compatible too

@fgregg
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fgregg commented Apr 8, 2019 •
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not sure if the behaviour should be set on initialization of census class or on the get data methods

probably on the methods.

@jeancochrane jeancochrane linked a pull request May 7, 2019 that will close this issue
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Expose configuration for handling coded values like -666666666 datamade/census
3 participants
@fgregg @loganpowell @jeancochrane