02/26/2026, 9:00am - 11:00am PST Register here
In this workshop, we will generate probabilistic population projections for all counties of Washington state, including probabilistic projections of the individual components of population change, such as the total fertility rate, life expectancy at birth and net migration.
The projections are generated using the programming language R. The most convenient way to work with R is from the RStudio Desktop. Basic familiarity with R is recommended.
To install packages needed in this workshop, open your R application and type
install.packages(c("bayesTFR", "bayesLife", "bayesPop",
"MortCast", "bayesMig", "devtools"), dependencies = TRUE)
The latest UN projections (WPP 2024) are available in the wpp2024 R package. Install it via:
options(timeout = 600)
devtools::install_github("PPgp/wpp2024")
Check that you have the latest versions installed, for example by typing
library(bayesPop)
library(wpp2024)
sessionInfo()
You should see versions of the above packages. Check that they are as follows:
wpp2024_1.1-3 bayesPop_12.0-1 MortCast_2.8-0 bayesLife_5.3-1
bayesTFR_7.4-4
Note that the newest version of bayesPop was submitted recently, but it is not required. If you see bayesPop_11.0-3 it should be OK.
The subnational datasets needed in this demo are available in the data directory of this repository. Note that these datasets do not represent any official metrics. Some of them were synthetically created and their only purpose is to illustrate the methodology.
Clone this repository to your computer, for example from the command line via
git clone https://github.com/PPgp/CSDEworkshop bayespop_workshop
Alternatively, one can clone it directly from an R Studio via File -> New Project -> Version Control -> Git. As repository URL enter https://github.com/PPgp/CSDEworkshop and as Project directory name enter bayespop_workshop. Then click on "Create Project".
Both of these alternatives create a directory "bayespop_workshop" which will be your working directory for this workshop. It contains the subdirectory "data" with the subnational datasets.
For projecting the total fertility rate and life expectancy at birth (e0), national probabilistic projections are needed and they should be placed into the subdirectory "data/wpp2024_projections". They could be generated from scratch, but to save time, please download them from our website as follows:
- Download the TFR compressed file and unpack it (e.g. using 7-Zip or WinZip on Windows or "tar xvfz" on Unix-based systems) into the "bayespop_workshop/data/wpp2024_projections" directory. It creates a subdirectory called "TFR1unc".
- Repeat the same with the e0 file. It creates a subdirectory called "e01".
After these steps, your "bayespop_workshop" directory should look like this:
Go to the workshop material (login credentials available at the workshop on Thursday 2/26/2026)