How to save a weighted data from r svydesign package?

Question

Is there a way to save weighted data so next time I directly load it? I have a large survey dataset, and use R's survey package. I load the data with feather package, but it takes considerable time when I apply svydesign. Here is a reproducible example:

df <- data.frame(col1 = rnorm(20, 0, 1), col2 = rnorm(20, 2, 2), w = rnorm(20, 1, .2))
df.w <- svydesign(id = ~1, data = df, weights = ~w)

I want to save df.w and use this for future analysis. Is there a way?

Answer 1

You can use saveRDS and readRDS to save/read single R objects like this.

library(survey)

df <- data.frame(col1 = rnorm(20, 0, 1), col2 = rnorm(20, 2, 2), w = rnorm(20, 1, .2))
df.w <- svydesign(id = ~1, data = df, weights = ~w)

####### save to file ##########
storage_file <- tempfile()
#storage_file <- "mydesign.rds"   ## uncomment here to use a local file
saveRDS(df.w, storage_file)

######## clear workspace #########
rm(df, df.w)

######### load the data ###########
df.w.loaded <- readRDS(storage_file)

df.w.loaded
## Independent Sampling design (with replacement)
## svydesign(id = ~1, data = df, weights = ~w)

######## delete storage file ######
file.remove(storage_file)

If you want to save several objects in a single file, take a look at ?save and ?load .