Recovery of Incomplete Data of Statistical Livestock Number

Abstract

In this paper we develop a process of agricultural data disaggregation in order to address the issue of the lack of up-to-date disaggregated data concerning main livestock categories, at sub-regional and municipality level in the Alentejo Region at South Portugal. The model developed assumes that livestock numbers are a function of the agricultural and forest occupation of the territory, and so, data concerning the existing agricultural and forest occupation, as well as the conversion of livestock numbers into normal heads (NH), are needed in order to determine this relation. The weight of each livestock category NH is estimated using a dynamic process based on generalized maximum entropy and cross-entropy minimization which comprises two stages. It was applied to the municipality of Castelo de Vide and their results were validated, in cross reference to real data from different sources.