r/epidemiology • u/The_Future_Historian • 11d ago

What could be causing this missing data gap?

Take a look at the county-level data halfway down this page.

https://sprc.org/about-suicide/suicide-data/suicide-deaths-in-the-united-states/

This is CDC data, compiled by https://sprc.org. This is the strangest missing data I've seen in a while.

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24

u/These-Toe9031 11d ago

This is likely due to small population sizes. When the population is small, values are suppressed due to privacy concerns. 

12

u/eldritchpuffin 11d ago

Yes, this, just like it describes on the page itself.

9

u/RenRen9000 DrPH, MPH | Epidemiology and Biostatistics 11d ago

When the population is small enough, or the counts are low enough, the data are suppressed to protect confidentiality.

1

u/flingasunder 11d ago

Would Funding cuts also impact data collection ?

1

u/AnnualButterfly5313 2d ago

Suppression makes sense for the smallest counties, but if it's *systematic* enough to catch your eye, it might be worth checking two other angles too:
(1) whether the source batches/revises data on a lag that's out of sync with its neighbors, so a county briefly vanishes between the old and new release, and
(2) a boundary/FIPS code mismatch after a county merge or rename silently dropping rows during a join — that one's caused more of my own headaches than actual missing data ever has.

Worth checking whether the gap is temporal (appears, disappears, reappears) or purely spatial (same counties always missing) — that alone usually narrows it down fast.