Multivariate Spatio-Temporal Survey Fusion with Application to the American Community Survey and Local Area Unemployment Statistics

Bradley, J.R., S.H. Holan, and C.K Wikle. "Multivariate Spatio-Temporal Survey Fusion with Application to the American Community Survey and Local Area Unemployment Statistics." Stat (2016): 224-233, available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sta4.120/full.
There are often multiple surveys available that estimate and report related demographic variables of interest that are referenced over space and/or time. Not all surveys produce the same information, and thus, combining these surveys typically leads to higher quality estimates. That is, not every survey has the same level of precision nor do they always provide estimates of the same variables. In addition, various surveys often produce estimates with incomplete spatio-temporal coverage. By combining surveys using a Bayesian approach, we can account for different margins of error and leverage dependencies to produce estimates of every variable considered at every spatial location and every time point. Specifically, our strategy is to use a hierarchical modelling approach, where the first stage of the model incorporates the margin of error associated with each survey. Then, in a lower stage of the hierarchical model, the multivariate spatio-temporal mixed effects model is used to incorporate multivariate spatio-temporal dependencies of the processes of interest. We adopt a fully Bayesian approach for combining surveys; that is, given all of the available surveys, the conditional distributions of the latent processes of interest are used for statistical inference. To demonstrate our proposed methodology, we jointly analyze period estimates from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, and estimates obtained from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Local Area Unemployment Statistics program. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.