1990 US Census Data

Data Type

Multivariate

Abstract

The USCensus1990 data set is a discretized version of the USCensus1990raw data set. Many of the less useful attributes in the original data set have been dropped, the few continuous variables have been discretized and the few discrete variables that have a large number of possible values have been collapsed to have fewer possible values.

Sources

The USCensus1990raw data set was obtained from the (U.S. Department of Commerce) Census Bureau website using the Data Extraction System. This system can be found at http://www.census.gov/DES/www/d es.html.

Donor of database

Chris Meek

Microsoft

Bo Thiesson

Microsoft

David Heckerman

Microsoft

Data Characteristics

The data was collected as part of the 1990 census.

There are 68 categorical attributes. This data set was derived from the USCensus1990raw data set. The attributes are listed in the file USCensus1990.attributes.txt (repeated below) and the coding for the values is described below. Many of the less useful attributes in the original data set have been dropped, the few continuous variables have been discretized and the few discrete variables that have a large number of possible values have been collapsed to have fewer possible values.

More specifically the USCensus1990 data set was obtained from the USCensus1990raw data set by the following sequence of operations;

• Randomization: The order of the cases in the original USCensus1990raw data set were randomly permuted.
• Selection of attributes: The 68 attributes included in the data set are given below. In the USCensus1990 data set we have added a single letter prefix to the original name. We add the letter 'i' to indicate that the original attribute values are used and 'd' to indicate that original attribute values for each case have been mapped to new values (the precise mapping is described below).

        --------------------------------------------------------------
          Old Variable        New Variable
        --------------------------------------------------------------
          Age         dAge
          Ancstry1        dAncstry1
          Ancstry2        dAncstry2
          Avail           iAvail
          Citizen         iCitizen
          Class           iClass
          Depart          dDepart
          Disabl1         iDisabl1
          Disabl2         iDisabl2
          English         iEnglish
          Feb55           iFeb55
          Fertil          iFertil
          Hispanic        dHispanic
          Hour89          dHour89
          Hours           dHours
          Immigr          iImmigr
          Income1         dIncome1
          Income2         dIncome2
          Income3         dIncome3
          Income4         dIncome4
          Income5         dIncome5
          Income6         dIncome6
          Income7         dIncome7
          Income8         dIncome8
          Industry        dIndustry
          Korean          iKorean
          Lang1           iLang1
          Looking         iLooking
          Marital         iMarital
          May75880        iMay75880
          Means           iMeans
          Military        iMilitary
          Mobility        iMobility
          Mobillim        iMobillim
          Occup           dOccup
          Othrserv        iOthrserv
          Perscare        iPerscare
          POB         dPOB
          Poverty         dPoverty
          Pwgt1           dPwgt1
          Ragechld        iRagechld
          Rearning        dRearning
          Relat1          iRelat1
          Relat2          iRelat2
          Remplpar        iRemplpar
          Riders          iRiders
          Rlabor          iRlabor
          Rownchld        iRownchld
          Rpincome        dRpincome
          RPOB            iRPOB
          Rrelchld        iRrelchld
          Rspouse         iRspouse
          Rvetserv        iRvetserv
          School          iSchool
          Sept80          iSept80
          Sex         iSex
          Subfam1         iSubfam1
          Subfam2         iSubfam2
          Tmpabsnt        iTmpabsnt
          Travtime        dTravtime
          Vietnam         iVietnam
          Week89          dWeek89
          Work89          iWork89
          Worklwk         iWorklwk
          WWII            iWWII
          Yearsch         iYearsch
          Yearwrk         iYearwrk
          Yrsserv         dYrsserv
  

• Mapping: In this step we map all of the old values for variables with prefix 'd' to new values. The mappings for the variables dAncstry1, dAncstry2, dHispanic, dIndustry, dOccup, dPOB were designed to correspond to a natural coarsening of the original values based on the information in the file coding.htm. The remaining variables are continuous valued variables and the mapping for these variables was chosen to make variables that were fairly uniformly distributed across the states (quantiles). The precise mappings are specified in the file USCensus1990.mapping.sql. This file contains all of T-SQL procedures used to map the variables. These procedures can be used directly in SQLServer to map the original values or translated to some other language.

        --------------------------------------------------------------
          Variable        Procedure
        --------------------------------------------------------------
          dAge            discAge
          dAncstry1       discAncstry1
          dAncstry2       discAncstry2
          dHispanic       discHispanic
          dHour89         discHour89
          dHours          discHours
          dIncome1        discIncome1
          dIncome2        discIncome2to8
          dIncome3        discIncome2to8
          dIncome4        discIncome2to8
          dIncome5        discIncome2to8
          dIncome6        discIncome2to8
          dIncome7        discIncome2to8
          dIncome8        discIncome2to8
          dIndustry       discIndustry
          dOccup          discOccup
          dPOB            discPOB
          dPoverty        discPoverty
          dPwgt1          discPwgt1
          dRearning       discRearning
          dRpincome       discRpincome
          dTravtime       discTravtime
          dWeek89         discWeek89
          dYrsserv        discYrsserv
  

Other Relevant Information

Hierarchies of values are provided in the file USCensus1990raw.coding.htm and the mapping functions used to transform the USCensus1990raw to the USCensus1990 data sets are giving in the file USCensus1990.mapping.sql.

Data Format

The data is contained in a file called USCensus1990.data.txt. The first row contains the list of attributes. The first attribute is a caseid and should be ignored during analysis. The data is comma delimited with one case per row.

References & Further Information

• The U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Census website
• Data Extraction System
• Meek, Thiesson, and Heckerman (2001), "The Learning Curve Method Applied to Clustering", to appear in The Journal of Machine Learning Research.
• MSR-TR-2001-34