Generate Random Personal Identity Codes

A function that generates random Finnish personal identity codes (hetu codes).

Usage

rpin(
  n,
  start.date = as.Date("1895-01-01"),
  end.date = Sys.Date(),
  p.male = 0.4,
  p.temp = 0,
  num.cores = 1
)

rhetu(
  n,
  start.date = as.Date("1895-01-01"),
  end.date = Sys.Date(),
  p.male = 0.4,
  p.temp = 0,
  num.cores = 1
)

Arguments

n: number of generated hetu-pins
start.date: Lower limit of generated hetu dates, character string in ISO 8601 standard, for example "2001-02-03". Default is "1895-01-01".
end.date: Upper limit of generated hetu. Default is current date.
p.male: Probability of males, between 0.0 and 1.0. Default is 0.4.
p.temp: Probability of temporary identification numbers, between 0.0 and 1.0. Default is 0.0.
num.cores: The number of cores for parallel processing. The number of available cores can be determined with detectCores(). Default is 1.

Value

a vector of generated hetu-pins.

Details

This function will return an error "too few positive probabilities" in sample.int function if you try to generate too many codes in a short enough timeframe. The theoretical upper limit of valid PINs is in the millions, but the number of valid PINs per day used to be 898 PINs at maximum, meaning 327770 for each year. Attempting to generate e.g. a 1000 pins for a timespan of one day would result in an error.

In practice this theoretical upper limit number was much lower since the old practice was that the same personal number component cannot be "recycled" if it has been used in the past. To illustrate, if an identity code "010101-0101" has already been assigned to someone born in 1901-01-01, a similar code "010101A0101" for someone born in 2001-01-01 could not be used.

In hetu package version 1.1.0 we have taken into account a new government decree that increased the amount of valid century markers and therefore increased the amount of valid personal codes per day. Additionally, the decree has made it possible to recycle individual codes, as the century marker is now thought to be a distinguishing character of the personal identity code.

However, the current implementation still keeps the old 898 codes per day limit intact, and assigns new century markers with a low probability: old markers "-" and "A" are given a 95 markers are given a 1

In the future this may be altered into a waterfall pattern so that the initial 898 codes for each date get "-" as the century marker, the next 898 get "Y", and so on. This would mean that each day would have 5388 valid codes and the distribution of century markers would be more realistic in the sense that additional century markers are taken into use only after the previous range has been exhausted. However, this would require generating rather large datasets even for basic testing purposes.

Author

Pyry Kantanen, Jussi Paananen

Examples

x <- rpin(3)
hetu(x)
#>          hetu    sex p.num ctrl.char       date day month year century
#> 1 200992-248W Female   248         W 1992-09-20  20     9 1992       -
#> 2 140497-5844 Female   584         4 1997-04-14  14     4 1997       -
#> 3 271201A808D Female   808         D 2001-12-27  27    12 2001       A
#>   valid.pin
#> 1      TRUE
#> 2      TRUE
#> 3      TRUE
hetu(x, extract = "sex")
#> [1] "Female" "Female" "Female"
hetu(x, extract = "ctrl.char")
#> [1] "W" "4" "D"

x <- rhetu(3)
x
#> [1] "251141-180C" "230862-4881" "220989-599R"