Data Fusion for High-Resolution Estimation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel data fusion method that combines low-resolution administrative data with biased high-resolution online survey data to produce accurate high-resolution population health estimates, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a new data fusion approach that models sampling bias and learns a distribution close to online survey data while aligning with aggregated administrative data.

Findings

Method outperforms baselines on real testbed data.

Effective in combining biased high-res and unbiased low-res data.

Improves high-resolution health indicator estimation accuracy.

Abstract

High-resolution estimates of population health indicators are critical for precision public health. We propose a method for high-resolution estimation that fuses distinct data sources: an unbiased, low-resolution data source (e.g. aggregated administrative data) and a potentially biased, high-resolution data source (e.g. individual-level online survey responses). We assume that the potentially biased, high-resolution data source is generated from the population under a model of sampling bias where observables can have arbitrary impact on the probability of response but the difference in the log probabilities of response between units with the same observables is linear in the difference between sufficient statistics of their observables and outcomes. Our data fusion method learns a distribution that is closest (in the sense of KL divergence) to the online survey distribution and consistent with the aggregated administrative data and our model of sampling bias. This method outperforms baselines that rely on either data source alone on a testbed that includes repeated measurements of three indicators measured by both the (online) Household Pulse Survey and ground-truth data sources at two geographic resolutions over the same time period.