Basic Usage Examples¶

This section provides basic examples of how to use the fedfred library to interact with the FRED API.

Initializing the API Client¶

To use the fedfred library, you first need to initialize the API client with your FRED API key.

import fedfred as fd

# Initialize the API client
fred = fd.FredAPI(api_key="your_api_key_here")

Fetching a Time Series¶

You can fetch time series data for a specific economic indicator using the get_series_observations method.

# Fetch data for a specific economic indicator
series_id = "GDP"  # Example series ID
data = fred.get_series_observations(series_id)

# Display the first few rows of the data
print(data.head())

Fetching Metadata for a Series¶

You can fetch metadata for a specific series using the get_series method.

# Fetch metadata for a specific series
series_id = "GDP"
metadata = fred.get_series(series_id)

# Display the metadata
print(f"Title: {metadata.title}")
print(f"Frequency: {metadata.frequency}")
print(f"Units: {metadata.units}")

Exploring Categories¶

You can explore categories to discover related data series.

# Get top-level categories
categories = fred.get_category_children(category_id=0)

# Display the categories
for category in categories:
    print(f"Category: {category.name} (ID: {category.id})")

Fetching Tags for a Series¶

You can fetch tags associated with a specific series to better understand its context.

# Fetch tags for a specific series
series_id = "GDP"
tags = fred.get_series_tags(series_id)

# Display the tags
for tag in tags:
    print(f"Tag: {tag.name}")