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Random points in USA - average resident, facility, BG, block, or square mile

Source: R/testpoints_n.R
testpoints_n.Rd

Get data.table of Random Points (lat lon) for Testing/ Benchmarking/ Demos, weighted in various ways. The weighting can be specified so that each point reflects the average EPA-regulated facility, blockgroup, block, place on the map, or US resident.

Usage

testpoints_n(
  n = 10,
  weighting = c("frs", "pop", "area", "bg", "block"),
  region = NULL,
  ST = NULL,
  validonly = TRUE,
  dt = TRUE
)

Arguments

n

Number of points needed (sample size)

weighting

word indicating how to weight the random points (some synonyms are allowed, in addition to those shown here):

Note the default is frs, but you may want to use pop even though it is slower.

  • pop or people (slow) = Average Person: random person among all US residents (block point of residence per 2020 Census)

  • frs or facility = Average Facility: random EPA-regulated facility from actives in Facility Registry Service (FRS)

  • bg = Average Blockgroup: random US Census blockgroup (internal point like a centroid)

  • block = Average Block: random US Census block (internal point like a centroid)

  • area or place = Average Place: random point on a map (internal point of avg blockgroup weighted by its square meters size)

region

optional vector of EPA Regions (1-10) to pick from only some regions.

ST

optional, can be a character vector of 2 letter State abbreviations to pick from only some States.

validonly

return only points with valid lat/lon coordinates. Defaults to TRUE.

dt

logical, whether to return a table in data.table format (DEFAULT) instead of normal data.frame

Value

data.frame or table in data.table format with columns lat, lon in decimal degrees, and any other columns that are in the table used (based on weighting)

Examples

mapfast(testpoints_n(300, ST = c('LA','MS')) )
# \donttest{
n=2
for (d in c(TRUE,FALSE)) {
  for (w in c('frs', 'pop', 'area', 'bg', 'block')) {
    cat("n=",n,"  weighting=",w, "  dt=",d,"\n\n")
    print(x <- testpoints_n(n, weighting = w, dt = d)); print(class(x))
    cat('\n')
  }
}
# }