Better Ways to Aggregate Some Socio-Economic Variables (Like Median Household Income)

[daltare]

Aggregating some variables could be problematic, and may need to add a way to weight them by total population (with each given census unit) and/or number of households.

For median household income, aggregating a median value could be especially problematic (because the distribution of values changes when aggregating). May want to use the full demographic profiles / brackets.

For example, see: https://acsdatacommunity.prb.org/discussion-forum/f/forum/542/aggregating-median-hh-income-and-calculating-moes In particular, note the link to the LA Times Data Desk's census-data-aggregator: https://github.com/datadesk/census-data-aggregator#approximating-medians

That repository links to a document that describes the problem and has a proposed solution: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6165014-How-to-Recalculate-a-Median.html#document/p4/a508562

Also see this discussion: https://acsdatacommunity.prb.org/discussion-forum/f/forum/898/allocating-median-household-income-across-census-boundaries

[daltare]

Also see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18887382/how-to-calculate-the-median-on-grouped-dataset