Aggregation problem

Published:

The aggregation problem is a general data problem. Aggregated or coarse-grained data is always a lose of information from the actual individual data. That problem affects to most of science but specially the social and economic sciences due to the impossibility to get individual disaggregated data most of the times.

If the aggregated or emergence phenomena depends on dispersion of features (2nd order) and not on average of features (1st order), the lost of information is critical in order to build a model and understand the patterns with the available data.

See also

Areal unit problem

Papers