I hope everyone is healthy.
ESRI has some estimates of when estimates are unstable in the ACS tables
They use MoE to calculate coefficient of variation and have flags for low, med, high reliability. Looks like the formula you wrote below.
Coefficient of variation (CV) = 100* [(ME/(1.645)] / estimate
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/514a53bbcfd44b4ea2992b4c40059ef4
and see
https://doc.arcgis.com/en/esri-demographics/latest/regional-data/acs.htm#ESRI_SECTION1_805FF6F174ED48059E26696F0A440571
Does the Census Bureau have something that says when the MoE indicates estimates are unstable?
Thanks
Gene
Hi Gene -
I don't have a direct answer to your question. However, there was a pretty good discussion about interpreting coefficient of variation in this forum about a year ago
Different coefficients…
David Wong and Min Sun wrote about this set of issues in a paper published back in 2013 in Spatial Demography. This may be useful to some
Handling Data Quality Information of Survey data in GIS: A Case…
I am afraid that the Bureau actually miss handled there computation of MOE, if one is a frequentist, if one is a Bayesian that approach is even worse. On the frequentist, I had a debate with Bureau a long…
Different coefficients of variation with same information - Forum - Discussion Forum - American Community Survey Data Users Group (prb.org)
From what I remember, Esri tends to apply their reliability standards pretty indiscriminately - often to proportions / percentages. This has the problem that Matt and Jonathan describe in the above post.
-- Dave
Thanks, a very interesting discussion.
Handling Data Quality Information of Survey data in GIS: A Case of Using the American Community Survey Data.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF03354884.pdf?pdf=button
Best
- Stephen
Thanks very much for the link to this paper.