572 – Working with Imperfect Data
Estimating Characteristics of Strip Shopping Center Buildings in the 2012 CBECS
Jay Olsen
EIA, United States Energy Information Administration
The Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) is a quadrennial survey of commercial buildings, such as offices, retail stores, and other nonresidential structures. The survey collects information on energy use in buildings and their characteristics that are related to energy use. Finding a respondent who is knowledgeable about the entire building has always been a particular challenge for strip shopping centers, as most of the people on site are store managers who can only give information about their own establishment. To help rectify this, the 2012 CBECS used a new procedure in which the interviewers compiled a roster of all of the establishments in a strip shopping center building, and conducted interviews at a randomly chosen subset of the stores. The new procedure will produce a description of the establishments that were listed on the roster but not interviewed by imputing based on similar establishments that were interviewed. The interviewed and imputed establishment characteristics will then be aggregated into a description of the entire strip shopping center building.