Differences in the reporting units of data from diverse sources and changes in units over time are common obstacles to analysis of areal data. We compare common approaches to this problem in the context of changes over time in the boundaries of U.S. census tracts. In every decennial census, many tracts are split, consolidated, or changed in other ways from the previous boundaries to reflect population growth or decline. We examine two interpolation methods to create a bridge between years, one that relies only on areal weighting and another that also introduces population weights. Results demonstrate that these approaches produce substantially different estimates for variables that involve population counts, but they have a high degree of convergence for variables defined as rates or averages. Finally, the article describes the Longitudinal Tract Database (LTDB), through which we are making available public-use tools to implement these methods to create estimates within 2010 tract boundaries for any tract-level data (from the census or other sources) that are available for prior years as early as 1970.

中文翻译：

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对早在 1970 年至 2010 年的美国十年一次的人口普查区域数据进行插值：纵向区域数据库

来自不同来源的数据报告单位的差异以及单位随时间的变化是区域数据分析的常见障碍。我们在美国人口普查区域边界随时间变化的背景下比较了解决这个问题的常用方法。在每十年一次的人口普查中，许多地区都会从以前的边界分割、合并或以其他方式改变，以反映人口增长或下降。我们研究了两种插值方法来建立年份之间的桥梁，一种仅依赖于面积权重，另一种也引入了人口权重。结果表明，这些方法对涉及人口计数的变量产生了截然不同的估计，但它们对定义为比率或平均值的变量具有高度的收敛性。最后，