Why are there stars next to some quantity aggregations?

This is a marker the USITC created to indicate when there is likely suppression of quantity data by the Census Bureau in published official merchandise trade statistics. The data released by Census does not contain information or any indication of data suppression. However, the USITC can identify certain line items in the Census datafiles where, based on the HTS or Schedule B, a line should have reported a quantity. If the quantity data are missing from that field, DataWeb has flagged that record as potentially having suppressed quantity data. When applicable, these data flags are identified with stars in the various quantity aggregations conducted by users in the application to alert the users their aggregation contains one or more records with likely suppressed quantity data. The discovery that there were suppressed quantity data in the Census Bureau data files is also the reason for which we have disabled the application’s calculation of average unit values (AUVs) since such calculations can be significantly distorted depending on the amount of quantity data that has been suppressed within a specific query.