Max/min expansion factor at different geographic levels

[ghost]

max_expansion_factor and min_expansion_factor are currently used as the upper or lower limits for the FINAL weight.

• I was wondering whether it’s a good idea to allow max_expansion_factor at different geographic levels – for example, 30 at the TRACT level and 10 at the TAZ level; or 30 at the TRACT level but no limit at the TAZ level. Since the sub-level balancing steps are done level-by-level after SEED is refactored to match META, it seems not a bad idea to include separate expansion factors for each level.

• I cannot find the expansion factors (at different levels and the final one) in any of those output tables, although I can manually calculate those using weights in the final_summary_hh_weights. I was wondering if the expansion factors can be added to the final_summary_hh_weights and listed at different levels. This can help the user determine the max or min expansion factors. Also, this can avoid any user calculation error since there are many weights.

• Is it a good idea to add a feature to allow the max_expansion_factor at the seed hh level? For example, we might have some HH samples that are not usually observed, and we don’t want such HHs to be expanded a lot in the region. This can be used to avoid any abnormal seed hhs from being allocated a lot without setting such a limitation for other seed hhs.