Metadata for Fields Produced by Business Analyst

[JPNW]

More of a question than an idea... but could Esri provide metadata on what the fields BA produces mean and how to interpret those values? For instance, what do the fields "apportionmentConfidence" and "populationToPolygonSizeRating" mean? What is the high and low values for those fields? Is a apportionmentConfidence rating of 2.576 high or low?

There doesn't seem to be any metadata or supporting documentation for the specific values and fields it creates beyond the basic methodology (Data Apportionment) behind the tool. 

Thank you!

-Josh

[HelenThompson]

Hi Josh
We do have documentation here: https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/geoenrichment/api-reference/reliability.htm
but this is a great idea to allow users to directly get to this doc.

[HelenThompson]

We have an opportunity to expand on existing document and how users can access it.

[HelenThompson]

Hi Josh

I am one of the leads building the methodology behind apportionment and the model for calculating these scores. There is some extensive documentation here https://developers.arcgis.com/rest/geoenrichment/reliability/

In simple terms the apportionment reliability score is a combination of the mean of all the scores that influence the apportionment, from population dispersion to census age to census sampling methods. These are all discussed in the doc page referenced above. The scores are scaled using a simple linear equation to a range of 1.0 (best) to 5.0 (worst), and then are averaged with the census reliability scores to produce the overall reliability score.

Polygon to Population Ratio is a model of the population of a given census polygon (scaled) compared to the area size (scaled). The ratio is again a linear equation to a create a range of 1.0 (best) to 5.0 (worst).

I hope this helps

Helen