weightflow: declarative, recipe-aware survey weighting in R

Producing analysis weights for a complex survey requires a sequence of hierarchical adjustments (resolving unknown eligibility, dropping out-of-scope units, restoring within-household selection, correcting for nonresponse, and calibrating to known population totals), after which design-consistent variances must account for the fact that several adjustments were themselves estimated from the sample.

Existing R tools cover parts of this workflow, but none expresses the whole cascade as a single auditable object, nor propagates the variability of every stage into the replicate weights.

We present weightflow, a dependency-free (base R) package that builds survey weights through a declarative, pipeable, tidymodels-style API: a recipe is defined lazily as a chain of step_*() adjustments and estimated with prep().

Separating definition from application makes the process reproducible and auditable, and lets a rescaling bootstrap and a delete-a-PSU jackknife re-apply the entire recipe on each replicate, so the replicate weights carry the uncertainty of every estimated stage, not only of the final calibration.

The package implements raking, post-stratification and linear/GREG calibration (with bounds, ridge penalisation, and domain-partitioned and integrative variants), model-assisted (Wu-Sitter) calibration, weighting-class and machine-learning response-propensity adjustments with cross-fitting, and representativity (R-)indicators.

Weights and replicate weights bridge to the survey and srvyr packages for design-based inference.

We validate the calibration and variance results against survey, and illustrate the full cascade on a bundled sample and on real household-survey microdata (the Uruguayan ECH), where it recovers a known poverty rate with design-based uncertainty.