Popweaver: a program for interpolation and visualization of census and other sparsely collected data

Demographic data is essential to inform socio-economic, epidemiological and other time series analyses. However, demographic data based on interpolations performed on census surveys spaced several years apart often bear severe quality problems, which propagate into studies that make use of those datasets. We present Popweaver, a user-friendly and free software that allows users to interpolate demographic data (stratified by age, geography, socio-economics, and other layers), visually inspect them, and generate ready-to-submit figures and three-dimensional spreadsheets with the results for further analyses. We illustrate the use of Popweaver with census data (1980, 1991, 2000, 2010) from Brazil, and its potential to reveal important demographic trends.