Aggregate population counts into age groups

Aggregate per-age population counts into coarser age groups defined by the (sorted) lower bounds in age_groups. When length(age_groups) == 1, all ages >= that value are aggregated into a single open-ended group ("Xplus"). When length(age_groups) > 1, groups are formed as age_groups[i] to age_groups[i+1] - 1 for i = 1:(n-1) and age_groups[n] and above for the final group. Human-readable labels are produced: "under1" for the 0–0 group, "ageX" for single-year groups, "XtoY" for ranges, and "Xplus" for the final open group. The function prints aggregation summaries to the console for each group using cat().

Usage

aggregateByAgeGroups(ages, pops, age_groups)

Arguments

ages

Numeric vector of ages (typically integers) corresponding to the entries in pops.

pops

Numeric vector of population counts for each age; must be the same length as ages. Note: NA values in pops will propagate into group sums because na.rm = TRUE is not used; clean or impute missing values beforehand if required.

age_groups

Numeric vector of lower bounds for desired age groups. Must be sorted in ascending order. If length is 1, the single value defines an "Xplus" group (ages >= X). For length > 1, contiguous non-overlapping groups are created as described above.

Value

A named list with components:

pops

Numeric vector of aggregated population counts, one element per group.

labels

Character vector of labels for each group (e.g. "under1", "age5", "0to4", "65plus").

age_ranges

List of numeric vectors of length 2 giving the inclusive lower and upper bounds for each group; the upper bound for the final group is Inf.

Details

• Group boundaries are inclusive at both ends for finite ranges (i.e. ages satisfying lower <= age <= upper). For the last group the upper bound is infinite.

• If no ages fall into a group the aggregated count for that group is 0 (because sum(numeric(0)) == 0).

• The function writes progress messages to the console with cat() for each aggregated group (useful for debugging / logging).

Examples

# \donttest{
# Multiple groups example
ages <- 0:100
pops <- rep(100, length(ages))
aggregateByAgeGroups(ages, pops, c(0, 5, 18, 65))
#> Aggregating ages 0 to 4: sum = 500
#> Aggregating ages 5 to 17: sum = 1300
#> Aggregating ages 18 to 64: sum = 4700
#> $pops
#> [1]  500 1300 4700 3600
#> 
#> $labels
#> [1] "0to4"   "5to17"  "18to64" "65plus"
#> 
#> $age_ranges
#> $age_ranges[[1]]
#> [1] 0 4
#> 
#> $age_ranges[[2]]
#> [1]  5 17
#> 
#> $age_ranges[[3]]
#> [1] 18 64
#> 
#> $age_ranges[[4]]
#> [1]  65 Inf
#> 
#> 

# Single open-ended group (65plus)
aggregateByAgeGroups(ages, pops, 65)
#> Aggregating ages 65 and above: sum = 3600
#> $pops
#> [1] 3600
#> 
#> $labels
#> [1] "65plus"
#> 
#> $age_ranges
#> $age_ranges[[1]]
#> [1]  65 Inf
#> 
#> 
# }