A New Approach to Round Tabular Data

Controlled Rounding is a technique to replace each cell value in a table with a multiple of a base number such that the new table satisfies the same equations as the original table. Statistical agencies prefer a solution where cell values already multiple of the base number remain unchanged, while the others are one of the two closest multiple of the base number (i.e., rounded up or rounded down). This solution is called zero-restricted rounding. Finding such a solution is a very complicated problems, and on some tables it may not exist. This paper presents a mathematical model and an algorithm to find a good-enough near-feasible solution for tables where a zero-restricted rounding is complicated. It also presents computational results showing the behavior of the proposal in practice.