New R package sheldusr: Losses from Natural Disasters in the United States

The SHELDUS database is database on human and property losses from natural disasters in the United States. Although the data is free, downloading the data is tedious and so is cleaning and analyzing it. The new R package sheldusr comes with the cleaned and pre-processed SHELDUS data and includes functionality to retrieve data for any desired time period or natural hazard(s) of interest.

The home page for the package presents some examples and graphics. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/sheldusr

Below are the relevant CRAN and GitHub sites:

• CRAN package repository
• GitHub site for the preliminary work towards the R package sheldusr
• GitHub site for the final R package sheldusr

This is my first package and I think it could be improved in several ways. I hope to make these improvements in the coming months. In the meantime, please let me know if you find any errors or if you have any comments or suggestions.

Towards the R package sheldus: Part 2: Losses from Natural Disasters in the US

In my earlier post I summarized the work on my upcoming R package on the SHELDUS database. This is a database on human and property losses from natural disasters in the United States. Although the data is free, downloading the data is tedious and so is cleaning and analyzing it. My goal is to package the data efficiently so it could be accessed and analyzed easily through R. And some day, develop one package for loss information analysis from various databases (e.g., SHELDUS, EM-DAT, and FEMA's Flood Insurance Program).

Status

• At this point the code has all the data retrieval functionality available through the GUI from SHELDUS - only in a matter of seconds!
• retrieval by year
• retrieval by hazard type
• adjustment for inflation
• [TODO] Presidential Disaster Declarations data and also data prior to 1960 needs to be included (these amount to about 40,000 records of the total 820,000 records)

In this second post, I will be extract the entire SHELDUS data and create some interesting graphics. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/sheldus/blob/master/publish_part2.md

All the graphics and code are available at my GitHub site - https://github.com/RationShop/sheldus

Any help or comments appreciated.

Towards the R package sheldus, Part 1: Natural Disaster Losses in the US in 2012

The SHELDUS database, short for Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database in the United States (http://webra.cas.sc.edu/hvri/products/sheldus.aspx), from the University of South Carolina, is a  database on human and property losses from natural disasters in the United States. Data from this database includes County-level information on property losses, crop losses, injuries and fatalities from 18 different types of natural hazards (hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc.) from about 1960 to the present.

Pros

• Data is free
• Inflation adjusted losses are also available

Cons

• Downloading the approximately 200 MB data (as of Nov 2013) from the GUI is tedious. There does not seem to be an easy way to download the entire data all at once. 
• Currently only one reference year could be chosen for inflation adjustment. What if someone wanted multiple years or wanted to update their data next year - they would have to download the entire data set again through the clunky GUI!
• Sharing the data and analysis of the entire data is not easy because of its size and layout.

Goal

• Build an R package which would come with the entire SHELDUS data. 
• Create functions to display and analyze the data.  
• [future maybe] Combine this with other disaster damage info (e.g., FEMA's NFIP -https://github.com/RationShop/nfip).

Status/TODOs

• Most of the code for cleaning and formatting the data, IO and graphics is ready.
• Instead of plain text, I use the binary format (and a few tricks) reducing the data size to 30 MB (from ~ 200 MB!).
• [TODO] Ability to retrieve data for multiple years/perils at once.
• [TODO] Code for inflation adjustment.
• [TODO] Presidential Disaster Declarations data and data prior to 1960 needs to be included.

I will be revising the code towards building a complete R package. Along my way I will be doing several QA/QC checks and will be posting on my analyses.

In this first post, I will be looking at losses in 2012. Please see - https://github.com/RationShop/sheldus/blob/master/publish_part1.md

All the graphics and code are available at my GitHub site - https://github.com/RationShop/sheldus

Any help or comments appreciated.