Combining Survey Data with Other Data Sources

Abstract

Collecting data using probability samples can be expensive, and response rates for many household surveys are decreasing. The increasing availability of large data sources opens new opportunities for statisticians to use the information in survey data more efficiently by combining survey data with information from these other sources. We review some of the work done to date on statistical methods for combining information from multiple data sources, discuss the limitations and challenges for different methods that have been proposed, and describe research that is needed for combining survey estimates.