FAQs on the exercise Table of Proportions: Missing Data
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At the bottom of the assignment, it asks the question “Can you think of scenarios where one might be more appropriate to report than the other?”. I’m struggling to understand/visualize when it would be better to leave out the NaN proportion vs. include it in the Table of Proportions. Could someone please provide some “real life” kinds of examples of why you’d choose one or the other?
Apologies for a rather delayed reply that you’ve probably moved on from. It’s one of those very situation dependent issues. You might to ask why there are missing values and do they have a valid meaning. Whether or not you use them depends on the what you’re trying to get out of your data.
Some sets of data might be more obvious candidates to drop missing data, for example sensors for monitoring sea level would be of little use when they had no valid data (unless perhaps you were looking into the state of the monitoring network or something similar).
The census example is interesting as it can split both ways depending on what you question you’re trying to answer. Chances are many choices are not mandatory, perhaps some will fill out “prefer not to say” or an equivalent, others might simply leave a question blank.
You might find interesting changes in culture by comparing the yearly change of no answer in something like marital status, ethnicity or gender. On the other hand you might want to find out something like what % of the population speaks a certain language, at this point missing data might be less helpful.
There’s no hard and fast rule, ideally you’d either know or be able to work out why certain data was missing and then decide whether it’s important or not to the current question you’re trying to answer.
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