For example, if I want to know a page views/relative prevalence of a Reddit post, and I have the upvote and downvote data.
Is it valid that I use the upvote and downvote to predict that, even if I will never get the page views of that post?
Topic estimators descriptive-statistics statistics
Category Data Science
You can estimate even with 0...
The actual question is about the error that you make in estimation, and that it course can be pretty bad.
What you should try to argue is that the best you can do is likely a linear model based on upvotes and downvotes. Assuming a linear model, it will look like this: alpha * upvotes + beta * downvotes + bias. If your subsequent steps include another linear model that learns another weight and bias, then you don't need to know alpha, beta, and bias, as these changes would likely cancel out.
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