Reengineering the Census Bureau's Annual Economic Surveys (2018) / Chapter Skim
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6 Editing, Imputation, Disclosure Control, and Quality Standards
6 Editing, Imputation, Disclosure Control, and Quality Standards
Pages 119-136
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. Many of the annual economic surveys use updated administrative data from the U.S.
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staff dedicated to editing, imputation, and review for five of the annual economic surveys -- ASM, Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS) , Annual Wholesale Trade Survey (AWTS)
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RECOMMENDATION 6-1: The Census Bureau should review the edit processes in the annual economic surveys with a goal of focusing the edits on important variables for estimates, automating the remaining edits as much as possible, and reducing the person nel time spent on edits while maintaining the quality of the survey estimates. The Bureau should thoroughly test streamlined edit pro cesses with the goal of developing a standard set of edits that will work for most of the current annual economic surveys and for the panel's recommended Annual Business Survey System.
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SOURCE: Information provided to the panel by the Census Bureau.
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when not reported; • imputation of missing receipts based on payroll done sequentially: payroll, then receipts, then materials; • derivation of totals from reported details; • imputation of totals (and detailed items, if any) using regression models with current year data or regression models using both current year and prior year data; • raking to derive detailed items that sum to the total for a given complex; • of historically based ratios to impute use detailed items of a specific complex; and • rounding checks on specific items when reported data fails specific limit checks.
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; • imputation of annual revenue from a BR data are used to compare reported data for the regression model; company to administrative receipts. Administrative • multiplication of a unit's prior period value data sometimes used in place of items that are by a "ratio of identicals"; and missing/imputed for the company.
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. Administrative data are sometimes used to impute data for missing items.
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nonresponding unit Business Missing items imputed in various ways: Not applicable Register • substitution of administrative data for current year; • substitution of the sum of subannual (monthly, quarterly) data for current year; • multiplication of unit's prior period value by a ratio of current-to-prior period data, where the data item used in the ratio is assumed to be highly correlated with the data item of interest (e.g., inventory-to-sales)
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Some surveys, including ARTS, AWTS, and SAS, impute missing values for some items by multiplying a prior period's value by a ratio of current-to-prior period data for a closely related item; for example, current period inventories may be imputed by multiplying last period's inventories by the ratio of current period sales to prior period sales. 6.2.1 Use of Administrative Data for Imputation Many, but not all, of the annual economic surveys make use of administrative data to impute values for missing items (see Section 4.1, "Data Sources," and Table 4-1 in Chapter 4)
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. RECOMMENDATION 6-2: The Census Bureau should harmo nize the use of administrative data from the Bureau's Business Register and other sources across the annual economic surveys for the purposes of imputing values for missing responses and cross checking the reliability of reported data.
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Evaluation studies can be designed with that in mind. RECOMMENDATION 6-3: The Census Bureau should systemati cally evaluate all item imputation models used for missing data in the annual economic surveys to determine whether improvements can be made in either the form of the model or the covariates used for prediction.
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Nevertheless, the current procedure of treating item imputations as real data, which inevitably leads to underestimated standard errors, needs to be replaced and research conducted into alternative methods. RECOMMENDATION 6-5: The Census Bureau should conduct research into and adopt a variance estimation method for the annual economic surveys that will allow the effects of item imputation to be included in published standard error estimates and by data users in their own analyses.
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RECOMMENDATION 6-6: The Census Bureau should use com mon terminology across the annual economic surveys to describe imputation methods. These terms should be included in the glossary of terms related to sample design features, sampling units, and esti mation methods proposed in Recommendation 5-1 (in Chapter 5)
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Currently, the Census Bureau's annual economic surveys use a cell suppression procedure for the tabular data that are published, with the exception of the two surveys that are used to update the Business Register -- COS and the Business and Professional Classification Survey. These surveys do not publish tables or other data products.
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RECOMMENDATION 6-7: The Census Bureau should continue the work it has begun on improving and harmonizing disclosure control procedures for the annual economic surveys. As part of this work, it should investigate why rates of cell suppression vary across the surveys and whether there are ways to standardize the cell suppression rules if different rules are part of the explanation.
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The Census Bureau needs to consider whether a consistent procedure for quality suppression is appropriate across all of the annual economic surveys. The annual economic surveys use cell suppression for two purposes: (1)
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of esti mates in tables developed from the annual economic surveys. 6.5 REFERENCES NOTE: All URL addresses were active as of November 2017.
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U.S. Census Bureau Statistical Quality Standards.
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