Is the Government Still Collecting Inflation Data? Well …

reducing collection by roughly 20% certainly isn’t the same as stopping or radically reducing data collection. But it’s not nothing. Statistical models can improve the quality of collected data. But they can’t really replace it. Statistical models can clear up the signal in your data or extrapolate what the data would be in areas where there are collection challenges — say, estimating the population of transient immigrant and/or undocumented populations for the Census or getting the opinions of low-trust male voters for political pollsters. But the more you’re relying on “imputation” or modeling for your data, the lower the quality of your data becomes