dwpstat

This package provides access to the ‘Stat-Xplore Open Data API’, containing welfare statistics from the UK Government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The ‘Stat-Xplore Open Data API’ is a JSON REST API, with the same data as on the Stat-Xplore online service. All queries require the use of an API key. To set up an API key, use dwp_api_key(). The API is free to use, but queries are rate limited. To find the number of allowable queries per hour, and the number of queries remaining in a given hour, use dwp_rate_limit().

Full documentation of the API is available here.

dwpstat returns metadata in tibble format, and data (with the dwp_get_data() command) in a list format. The list format is very messy, thanks to the way the API is built, and so dwpstat does not convert this data into a tibble or similar.

Future Work

This package remains in development. The specific functions are likely to remain stable, but the data returned by the dwp_get_data() function remains messy withs data labels stored in a seperate array from the actual data, making it difficult to work with, particularly for users unfamiliar with multi-dimensional arrays.

The actual data queried by dwp_get_data() is returned in one multi-dimensional array, while the dimension names - row, columns, wafers, etc - are returned in another array. dwpstat does not match these two arrays together. I suspect there may be functionality like this in purrr but I haven’t been successful in implementing a generic function to handle all the possible array dimensions that can be queried.

Pull requests providing functionality to match the field array (containing the names of rows, columns, etc) with the cubes array (containing the actual data) are much appreciated, as in any advice on developing a solution to this problem.

Installation

You can install the development version of dwpstat from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("evanodell/dwpstat")

Use

library(dwpstat)
x <- dwp_get_data(database = "str:database:ESA_Caseload",
                   measures = "str:count:ESA_Caseload:V_F_ESA",
                   column = c("str:field:ESA_Caseload:V_F_ESA:CCSEX",
                              "str:field:ESA_Caseload:V_F_ESA:CTDURTN"),
                   row = "str:field:ESA_Caseload:V_F_ESA:ICDGP",
                   wafer = "str:field:ESA_Caseload:V_F_ESA:IB_MIG")

class(x)
[1] "list"

names(x)
[1] "query"         "database"      "measures"      "fields"        "cubes"         "annotationMap"

Meta

Bug reports, feature requests and pull requests are all welcome.

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Get citation information for dwpstat in R with citation(package = 'dwpstat')

Odell E (2018). dwpstat: Access ‘Stat-Xplore’ data on the UK benefits system. doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1421684 (URL: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1421684), R package version 0.1.0, <URL: https://github.com/dr-uk/dwpstat>.

A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is

  @Manual{,
    title = {{dwpstat}: Access 'Stat-Xplore' data on the UK benefits system},
    author = {Evan Odell},
    year = {2018},
    note = {R package version 0.1.0,
    doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1421684},
    url = {https://github.com/dr-uk/dwpstat},
  }

License: MIT