marginal

[Persis]

Dear friends,

Could you help me with the term "marginal table" in this document?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...sg=AFQjCNG4RSMJmfgGvLwds6mjujl7xJn3uQ&cad=rja

we work solely with sets
of marginal tables that have been publicly released. Likewise, we do not address the
interesting question of which marginal tables can be released without compromising the
4
confidentiality of the unit-record data. For a discussion of this, see Dobra and Fienberg
(2000).

 

[Fabulist]

Sorry, that document has 121 pages. I'm not going to go searching through 121 pages to find more context. If you can point out where the mention of "marginal tables" occurs, it would help me or anyone else inclined to help you.

Social scientists talk about the "marginals" in tables. These are the totals across lines and down columns that are, therefore, on the "margins" of the tables. Possibly, "marginal tables" are tables that collect these "marginals" from a larger set of tables. But that's a guess. You will have to do your own analysis of the text, or provide a more specific reference.

 

[Egmont]

Marginal tables are defined in Section 2.1.1 of the document, on page 11. They are, in essence, a reduced version of the original table obtained by ignoring one or more variables. I don't see a language question here. If you have a deeper question about what they mean in terms of data structures and the content of this paper, this isn't the right forum for it.