ENCE
Regional Hub for Big Data webinars discuss experiments with alternative data
March 07, 2024 09h28 AM | Last Updated: March 07, 2024 04h15 PM
The UN Regional Hub for Big Data in Brazil will carry out a series of webinars to present experiences of using alternative data sources in the production of reliable indicators. The first seminar will be on March 15, at 1 PM, and it will talk about weighting a non-probabilistic sample to estimate indicators of Internet quality for Brazilian schools. The speaker Thiago de Oliveira Meireles, a doctoral candidate from USP, will talk about the method that allowed to create estimates for the entire school population from measurements of Internet quality of a group of self-selected schools.
The event will be translated into Portuguese, English and Spanish. Enrollment is free and is already open. To participate, just enroll on link https://forms.gle/Xr8pT2ELJZE3EvuT7.
Alternative sources for public statistics
The use of alternative data sources to produce precise public statistics has received an increased attention from the academic community and statistical offices. Experiments are being accomplished to enable the production of public data, reducing distortions caused by factors like self-selection or under-coverage.
Two more Hub seminars are scheduled for the next months. On April 19, João Gabriel Malaguti Sobrinho, a doctoral candidate from ENCE, will talk about the experiment that attempted to amend the bias in the estimate of COVID-19 cases in the Brazilian population from the administrative record of tests published by the Ministry of Health. On May 17, Luciene Maria Torquato Cerqueira Batista, a doctoral candidate from UFPE, will detail the experiment that used algorithms of data scraping to produce price inference and sampling of the virtual trade of mobile telephones.
ENCE coordinates UN Regional Hub for Big Data in Brazil
Resulting from a partnership between the IBGE and the UN Statistics Division, the UN Regional Hub for Big Data in Brazil (https://hub.ibge.gov.br) was launched in November 2021 in the XI Statistical Conference of the Americas, carried out by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). The Hub is hosted in the National School of Statistical Sciences (ENCE), an academic arm of the IBGE, which coordinates the efforts and contributions from different areas of the IBGE in support to the activities of the Regional Hub.
The project aims at contributing for the advance in the use of Big Data to improve the production of official statistics, fostering the knowledge sharing and the development of innovative initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition to Brazil, four countries are also part of the initiative as headquarters of either global or regional hubs: Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Rwanda and China.
