Detection of Potentially Influential Errors in Statistical Survey Data

Riassunto. In this paper we discuss methodological problems and critical aspects relating to the identification of errors potentially influent on the estimates of target parameters in business survey. Potentially influential errors are generally identified through techniques that include outlier detection methods as well as approaches aiming at sorting units based on the impact of their potential errors on target parameter estimates. In general, these techniques allow to prioritize units to be manually revised/followed up, in order to optimize the trade-off between costs of data treatment and data quality. The assumption is that the remaining units can be treated by less expensive approaches without affecting substantially the quality of final data.