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Program is Subject to Change

Monday, June 14
Mon, Jun 14, 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM
TBD
Adventures in Administrative and Alternative Source Data

Developing Statistical Frameworks for Administrative Data: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown (308001)

Hannah Finselbach, Office for National Statistics 
Danni Lewis, Office for National Statistics 
*Tom Tarling, Office for National Statistics 
Karina Williams, Office for National Statistics 
Charlie Wroth-Smith, Office for National Statistics 

Keywords: frameworks, administrative data, methods

The quantity of administrative data created, stored and processed in the world has grown exponentially over recent years, but the statistical theory to support its use in official statistics has not. That’s not to say that within the statistical community we are not using or investigating of a wide variety of statistical sources, but the methods used are not based on well-established theory like we have for surveys. As a National Statistical Institute (NSI), we are transforming to put administrative and alternative data sources at the core of our statistics. Combining new sources with surveys will allow us to meet the ever-increasing user demand for improved and more detailed statistics. However, using administrative data involves addressing a range of statistical challenges as identified in “Statistical challenges of administrative and transaction data” (Hand, 2018*).

ONS has established a methodological research programme to address these challenges by developing statistical frameworks for using and integrating administrative and transactional data to produce official statistics and analysis. Key themes of the programme include quality, linkage, privacy, estimation, statistical design, analysis and innovative techniques.

This talk will outline our achievements to date, our plans, and the challenges that remain to be solved. We will present the developments so far, especially relating to use of administrative data in the transformation of short-term economic statistics, and remaining challenges.

*Hand, D., “Statistical challenges of administrative and transaction data.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, 2018