PUMS Dashboard - henry fitts, director of innovation

The Office of Innovation is creating a series of interactive web-based reports analyzing the city's financially distressed populations in order to​ assist the Rochester Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative (RMAPI) in targeting its strategies. These reports use Microsoft Power BI software and leverage Census American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) files. PUMS offers unique capabilities that typical census estimates cannot. Typical census estimates are presented for a limited number of variables, in limited combinations, and are pre-aggregated for geographies. Instead, PUMS provides a full 5% population sample of anonymized responses with over 100 variables. The PUMS data contains responses from approximately 10,500 individual Rochesterians, with variables including earnings from employment, race, public benefits status, disability status, employment status, and lots more. Using proper weighting fields, researchers can compute custom estimates as is done by Census staff for the official published estimates. Power Bi is a powerful software that streamlines basic processing and visualization of data. Feeding PUMS data into PowerBi allows the Office of Innovation to create powerful, interactive data features such as the below report, and users can explore on their own and slice and dice according to their needs.