IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/osfxxx/v67k9.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Using the Poisson Distribution for Estimating Households by Household Size

Author

Listed:
  • Jarosz, Beth

Abstract

Infrastructure planners often require detail about the number of households by household size at very small levels of geography (census tract or smaller) to calibrate their models. In addition, these data must also be projected into the future in order to support planning efforts. This paper documents a statistical technique for estimating the distribution of households by household size using a modified application of the Poisson distribution. This technique is valuable to demographers as it provides a simple and reliable tool for estimating the distribution of household sizes at nearly any level of geography for a given point in time. There are a wide variety of applications of the Poisson distribution in biology and engineering. However, there are only few documented applications in demographics. This article puts forth two key advancements over prior published work: (1) an entirely new, and greatly simplified method for applying the distribution, (2) evidence of the reliability of the technique for estimating household size distributions in small geographic areas (e.g. counties and census tracts). Tests on U.S. Census data (1990-2010) suggest that the model is suitable for use in estimating the distribution of households by household size at the state, county, and census tract level.

Suggested Citation

  • Jarosz, Beth, 2017. "Using the Poisson Distribution for Estimating Households by Household Size," OSF Preprints v67k9, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:v67k9
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/v67k9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/5967c91a9ad5a100483d2959/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/v67k9?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:v67k9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://osf.io/preprints/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.