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Chapter 6 – Data Suppression - Other

Table of contents

As indicated in Section Suppression – Indian reserves, suppression of data occurs when certain questions are not asked of all respondents. Additionally, suppression of data may be applied for product-specific reasons due, typically, to the size of the product and/or the constraints of the media on which the product is being disseminated.

Incidence reporting

Incidence reporting is a process used to order or rank characteristic data by size within products. It can be used as a method to select only the 'n' highest categories of a characteristic for inclusion in a product.

Zero suppress

Zero suppress refers to the removal of records in which all of the estimates are equal to zero. This method is used to reduce the size of an output product by removing any rows of the output matrix where all data are equal to zero.

Place of work flow suppression

The following is a guideline only therefore its implementation in all flow tables is not mandatory. The primary purpose is for its application to standard data products displayed on the Internet.

Flow suppression is a process used to remove records with very low estimates from place of work flow tables. It can be used as a method to select only those commuting flows with an estimate greater than a threshold value for inclusion in a product. The default value is 20. These are typically product-specific requirements and therefore are not part of the automated suppression systems.

Data quality and confidentiality table symbols

NHS standard products will contain two Statistics Canada standard table symbols. The table below shows each symbol and its description.

Data quality and confidentiality table symbols
Symbol Description
... not applicable
x suppressed to meet the confidentiality requirements of the Statistics Act

Note: When statistic suppression is applied (e.g., MMM, record count, estimate, outlier), a zero is outputted instead of the 'x' symbol. This is done to ensure there is no risk of residual disclosure.
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