Developing an Edit System for Industry Statistics

All survey data, in particular economic data, must be validated for consistency and reasonableness. The various fields, such as value of shipments, salary and wages, total employment, etc., are compared against one another to determine if one or more of them have aberrant values. These comparisons are typically expressed as so-called ratio edits and balance tests. For example, historical evidence indicates that the ratio between salary and wages divided by total number of employees in a particular industry usually lies between two prescribed bounds. Balance tests verify that a total equals the sum of its parts. When a data record fails me or more edits, at least one response item is subject to adjustment, and the revised record should pass all edits. An edit system being developed at the Census Bureau has as its core a mathematical based procedure to locate the minimal number of fields to impute and then to make imputations in the selected fields. Subject-matter expertise will be called upon to enhance the performance of the core edit, especially in the area of imputation. Among the factors that will be brought to bear are patterns of response error, relative reliability of the fields, and varying reliability of the edits.