Edited by author 03-08-2004 12:06 AM
(contributions to other questions at the end)

1 - RFA_2A has 7 categories but only values 1-4. Should we really assume that there were no donations above $10?

2 - Is there a description somewhere of what the values mean? In the dictionary many of the values are said to be nominal/symbolic but we only get numerical values with no information as to what was the conversion process.


/m6
Jay, I added all the values in these columns and at least one added to more than 200 so I don't think these values are percentages/probabilities. A possibility that could make sense is that the donation may have been sent by some other association and these numbers reflect membership statistics. There does not some to be some requirement that the donations were made by individuals.

/m4
Anjum, I believe the example in class was different from this one. In the elevator case we had some waiting time information and then quit - this is 'incomplete' information, not exactly missing information. A commonly used approach, with arguable merits, is to replace the missing values with the mean of the known values.

About the difference between "ODATEW" and "FISTDATE", I just noticed that there are some fields about promotion history and giving history but nothing in these mentions PVA. Maybe these are more general history fields reflecting the overall contribution history and not just PVA donations?