paperforfourteenthinternationalconferenceoninput-output.docVIP

Paper for Fourteenth International Conference on Input-Output Techniques October 10-15, 2002, Montréal, Canada Distance, Degree of Freedom and Error of RAS Method Xu Jian Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science Chinese Academy of Sciences 100080, Beijing(China) E-mail: jianhsu@ Abstract The target of this paper is to analyze two problems as follows: (1) What is the tendency of change in error of RAS method with the change in distance between base matrix and target matrix. (2) What is the tendency of change in error of RAS method with the change in degree of freedom (DF) of base matrix. DF is determined by the amount of elements that are prior to identified for a n-order matrix whose both column totals and row totals are fixed. In other words, this paper mainly analyzes distance-error relationship and DF-error relationship. In literatures on empirical evaluation of RAS method, some authors discussed the difference in error when using different time intervals. In nature, the relation between time intervals and error is the distance-error relationship. However, a majority of these researches drew their conclusions only relying on few data, which result in unreliability of their conclusions and confine more in-depth research. So in this paper, the Monte Carlo experiment and other approaches are performed to generate large numbers of matrixes that have different distance to target matrix as base matrix. Four major conclusions are drawn: (1) Error has an increasing tendency with an increase of distance. (2) Distance-error relationship has quite large variability. For example, we design 20 matrixes all of that are closer target matrix than a comparison matrix no matter which distance measure is used, but we find 12 of these matrixes have greater error than comparison matrix. (3) Increase of distance has asymmetric effect on updating error. (4) When absolute distances are the same, the difference of relative distances has an importan