Official Statistics

The explosion in the amount of data, called “data deluge”, is forcing to redefine many scientific and technological fields, with the affirmation in any environment of Big Data as a potential source of data.
Official statistics institutions a few years ago started to open up to external data sources such as administrative data. The advent of Big Data is introducing important innovations: the availability of additional external data sources, dimensions previously unknown and questionable consistency, poses new challenges to the institutions of official statistics, imposing a general rethinking that involves tools, software, methodologies and organizations.
The relative newness of the field of study on Big Data requires first of all an introduction phase, for addressing the problems of definition and for defining the areas of technology involved and the possible fields of application.
The challenges that the use of Big Data poses to institutions that deal with official statistics are then presented in detail, after a brief discussion of the relationship between the new "data science" and statistics.
Although at an early stage, there is already a number, limited but growing practical experience in the use of Big Data as a data source for use in statistics by public (and private) institutions. The review of these experiences can serve as a stimulus to address in a more conscious and organized way the challenges that the use of this data source requires all producers of official statistics.
The worldwide spread of data sources (web, e-commerce, sensors) has also prompted the statistical community to take joint action to tackle the complex set of methodological, technical and legal problems. And so many national statistical institutes along with the most prestigious international organizations have initiated joint projects that will develop in the coming years to address the complex issues raised by Big Data for statistical methodology and computer technology.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

The paper reports on both methodological and substantive findings. It presents a method for generating simplified representations for regional urban populations, their geographical sub-populations and communities. the method generates greatly simplified high-resolution socio-economic profiles of populated geographical areas from complex large census data sets.

For a long time, one of my dreams was to describe the nature of uncertainty axiomatically, and it looks like I've finally done it in my co∼eventum mechanics! Now it remains for me to explain to everyone the co∼eventum mechanics in the most approachable way. This is what I'm trying to do in this work. The co∼eventum mechanics is another name for the co∼event theory, i.e., for the theory of experience and chance which I axiomatized in 2016 [1, 2]. In my opinion, this name best reflects the co∼event-based idea of the new dual theory of uncertainty, which combines the probability theory as a theory of chance, with its dual half, the believability theory as a theory of experience. In addition, I like this new name indicates a direct connection between the co∼event theory and quantum mechanics, which is intended for the physical explanation and description of the conict between quantum observers and quantum observations [4]. Since my theory of uncertainty satises the Kolmogorov axioms of probability theory, to explain this co∼eventum mechanics I will use a way analogous to the already tested one, which explains the theory of probability as a theory of chance describing the results of a random experiment. The simplest example of a random experiment in probability theory is the " tossing a coin ". Therefore, I decided to use this the simplest random experiment itself, as well as the two its analogies: the " "flipping a coin " and the " spinning a coin " to explain the co∼eventum mechanics, which describes the results of a combined experienced random experiment. I would like to resort to the usual for the probability theory " coin-based " analogy to explain (and first of all for myself) the logic of the co∼eventum mechanics as a logic of experience and chance. Of course, this analogy one may seem strange if not crazy. But I did not come up with a better way of tying the explanations of the logic of the co∼eventum mechanics to the coin-based explanations that are commonly used in probability theory to explain at least for myself the logic of the chance through a simple visual " coin-based " model that clarifies what occurs as a result of a combined experienced random experiment in which the experience of observer faces the chance of observation. I hope this analogy can be useful not only for me in understanding the co∼eventum mechanics.

You yourself, or what is the same, your experience is such ``coin'' that, while you aren't questioned, it rotates all the time in ``free flight''. And only when you answer the question the ``coin'' falls on one of the sides: ``Yes'' or ``No'' with the believability that your experience tells you.

The logic of uncertainty is not the logic of experience and as well as it is not the logic of chance. It is the logic of experience and chance. Experience and chance are two inseparable poles. These are two dual reections of one essence, which is called co∼event. The theory of experience and chance is the theory of co∼events. To study the co∼events, it is not enough to study the experience and to study the chance. For this, it is necessary to study the experience and chance as a single entire, a co∼event. In other words, it is necessary to study their interaction within a co∼event. The new co∼event axiomatics and the theory of co∼events following from it were created precisely for these purposes. In this work, I am going to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new theory of co∼events in a studying the logic of uncertainty. I will do this by the example of a co∼event splitting of the logic of the Bayesian scheme, which has a long history of erce debates between Bayesionists and frequentists. I hope the logic of the theory of experience and chance will make its modest contribution to the application of these old dual debaters., theory of experience and chance, co∼event dualism, co∼event axiomatics, logic of uncertainty, logic of experience and chance, logic of cause and consequence, logic of the past and the future, Bayesian scheme.

The logic of uncertainty is not the logic of experience and as well as it is not the logic of chance. It is the logic of experience and chance. Experience and chance are two inseparable poles. These are two dual reflections of one essence, which is called co∼event. The theory of experience and chance is the theory of co∼events. To study the co∼events, it is not enough to study the experience and to study the chance. For this, it is necessary to study the experience and chance as a single entire, a co∼event. In other words, it is necessary to study their interaction within a co∼event. The new co∼event axiomatics and the theory of co∼events following from it were created precisely for these purposes. In this work, I am going to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new theory of co∼events in a studying the logic of uncertainty. I will do this by the example of a co∼event splitting of the logic of the Bayesian scheme, which has a long history of fierce debates between Bayesionists and frequentists. I hope the logic of the theory of experience and chance will make its modest contribution to the application of these old dual debaters.

Keywords: Eventology, event, probability, probability theory, Kolmogorov’s axiomatics, experience, chance, cause, consequence, co∼event, set of co∼events, bra-event, set of bra-events, ket-event, set of ket-events, believability, certainty, believability theory, certainty theory, theory of co∼events, theory of experience and chance, co∼event dualism, co∼event axiomatics, logic of uncertainty, logic of experience and chance, logic of cause and consequence, logic of the past and the future, Bayesian scheme.

Turkish Population in Bulgaria According to Official
Censuses (1878-1934)
Bulgaria, one of the first countries to be conquered by the Ottoman after
transition to Rumelia, is the leading territory where large numbers of Turks settled. According to Bulgarian demographer G. Th. Danailof, as a result of settlement policies, Turkish population was in majority in Bulgaria from 16th century to the beginning of 19th century. In 1876, Turkish
and Bulgarian populations were almost the same. After the war between Turks and Russians of 1877-1878 the situation changed continuously to the disadvantage of Turks. Bulgarian Principality, which was made an autonomous principality under the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Berlin,
in the very first years of its establishment, formed an official statistics institution in 1880’s and from this date on, carried out regular cencuses. In this study, the institution’s data about Turks are analyzed and their consistency is studied.
Key words: Turk, Bulgarian, Population, Statistics, Migration.

Drawing on a range of national and international literature, this scoping paper explores some aspects of 'who are we' within a New Zealand context. Throughout the world the conceptualisation of ethnicity, or in some countries race, is undergoing significant change. There are many drivers including high rates of international migration, a vibrant indigenous rights movement in some countries, growing incidence and recognition of ethnic intermarriage, a concern about racism and discrimination, and, connected with this, a debate around how to support and, in some situations, integrate increasingly diverse populations into the wider community. Against this background, the paper draws together some ideas in the following areas: ethnogenesis; the official construction of ethnicity in New Zealand; ethnic intermarriage, and related to that, the transmission of ethnicity to children and multiple ethnicity; ethnic mobility; indigeneity; genetics, the human genome project and ethnicity; and the recent growth of New Zealander responses in the New Zealand census. It is not possible to draw many strong conclusions from the burgeoning national and international literature except there is a very vigorous and complex debate taking place about identity in most countries around the world. While there are some commonalities in the international debates, many local factors affect country specific discussions. However, some of the very broad threads that can be drawn from the literature include: while it is clear that for some people, and in some situations, ethnicity is a critical and daily part of their identity, for others ethnicity can be a minor part of identity or, in particular contexts, ethnicity might have little meaning; that identities are always emerging; that ethnicity is multi dimensional and that, in most countries, there is some fluidity of ethnicity; that identity is not only expressed but is perceived and observed and this perception of others can forge, reinforce and, at times, restrict identities; that the division of the world population, or the population of specific countries, into neat, non-overlapping groups is increasingly problematic; and that official definitions of ethnicity officially may not match all that closely ideas of 'who we are' personally. All of this suggests that, from a New Zealand policy perspective, while ethnicity can be an important analytical variable, much care is needed in its use.

This study compares five techniques to evaluate survey questions --expert reviews, cognitive interviews, quantitative measures of reliability and validity, and error rates from latent class models. It is the first such comparison that includes both quantitative and qualitative methods. We examined several sets of items, each consisting of three questions intended to measure the same underlying construct. We found low consistency across the methods in how they rank ordered the items within each set. Still, there was considerable agreement between the expert ratings and the latent class method and between the cognitive interviews and the validity estimates. Overall, the methods yield different and sometimes contradictory conclusions with regard to the 15 items pretested. The findings raise the issue of whether results from different testing methods should agree.

Very briefly on the new axiomatics of co∼events, it is intended for the rigorous mathematical description of an entanglement between observer and observation. Here we try to consider the new axiomatics in the normal human non-mathematical language, although it uses a new but quite natural terminology: ``a co∼event occurs (as an entanglement of observer and observation), a ket-event happens (as chance of observation), a bra-event is experienced (as an experience of observer) ''. And finally, it seems to me that the new theory in a not very rigorous mathematical language is most conveniently set out in the form of questions and answers that my students, graduate students, and colleagues often asked me during numerous internal and external discussions.

1.3.5. La georeferenziazione nelle problematiche socioeconomiche e l'econometria spaziale 41 1.3.6. La georeferenziazione nell'ambito della problematica delle piccole aree 43 2. GEOREFERENZIAZIONE E GEOCODIFICA NEL PSN 2008-2010 51 2.1. Introduzione 51 2.2. Rassegna critica del PSN: una lettura ragionata nell'ottica della georeferenziazione e della geocodifica 56 2.2.1. Macro-settori 56 2.2.2. Area "Territorio e ambiente" 58 2.2.3. Area "Popolazione e società" 61 2.2.4. Area "Amministrazioni pubbliche e servizi sociali" 64 2.2.5. Area "Mercato del lavoro" 70 2.2.6. Area "Sistema economico" 72 2.2.7. Area "Settori economici" 78 2.2.8. Area "Conti economici e finanziari" 84 2.2.9. Area "Metodologie e strumenti generalizzati" 85 2.2.10. Considerazioni di sintesi 86 3. PROPOSTA PER L'IMPIEGO DEI DATI GEOREFERENZIATI DELLA STATISTICA UFFICIALE PER LE ANALISI SPAZIALI 89 3.1. Introduzione 89 3.2. Considerazioni sulle potenzialità offerte dall'utilizzo dei riferimenti spaziali 100 APPENDICI 105

Recent research has attempted to examine the proportion of interviewer variance that is due to interviewers systematically varying in their success in obtaining cooperation from respondents with varying characteristics (i.e., nonresponse error variance), rather than variance among interviewers in systematic measurement difficulties (i.e., measurement error variance) -that is, whether correlated responses within interviewers arise due to variance among interviewers in the pools of respondents recruited, or variance in interviewer-specific mean response biases. Unfortunately, work to date has only considered data from a CATI survey, and thus suffers from two limitations: Interviewer effects are commonly much smaller in CATI surveys, and, more importantly, sample units are often contacted by several CATI interviewers before a final outcome (response or final refusal) is achieved. The latter introduces difficulties in assigning nonrespondents to interviewers, and thus interviewer variance components are only estimable under strong assumptions. This study aims to replicate this initial work, analyzing data from a national CAPI survey in Germany where CAPI interviewers were responsible for working a fixed subset of cases.

This deliverable DIII.1.2 is part of work package 3 in which indicators are gathered on the extent of misconduct and how institutions respond to breaches of scientific integrity. As a part of the empirical phase in PRINTEGER it contributes to our analysis of what policies and organizational responses are most likely to engender a culture of integrity in research organisations. The exploration of the incidence of misconduct is combined with the institutional response, since it is partly through this response that misconduct is made explicit or even defined.
This deliverable reflects on one of the key questions in the scientific integrity debate; what is the incidence or extent of misconduct in science? This is one of the questions raised many years ago, but a clear-cut answer is not available and may be even impossible to formulate. What we know about misconduct in science has for the largest part been derived from self-report studies and rough estimations in statistics of universities, control agencies or funding bodies. Therefore, it remains difficult to conclude whether or not these estimations are correct, significant and reliable.
In this deliverable, we report about our attempt to gather empirical data on breaches of integrity that have ended up in official administrative or institutional (academic) files e.g. cases which are visible in administrative procedures of research and research funding institutions or bodies for investigating misconduct cases. With this report, we do not pretend to have found a clear answer to the incidence question. We do however aim to make visible the procedural chain that is followed when a case of misconduct comes to the surface. Besides a ‘mapping’ exercise, we aim at discussing theoretical and methodological issues when it comes to gathering data relying upon official procedures. Registration practices differ greatly from one research institution to another, from one country to another. This makes comparative research in general (and between the countries involved in this deliverable) very difficult if not impossible.
However, we argue that issues concerning denunciation, discovery and registration practices, whistle blowing, transparency, gaining access, confidentiality, reputational bias etc. are precisely worth a close scrutiny and must be discussed when doing research on the prevalence of misconduct in science in a European context. Indeed, in our view these aspects of the incidence question are not merely technical (or methodological) but they reveal a lot about the nature of scientific misconduct and about how scientific integrity and misconduct are intimately intertwined with daily scientific and academic practices and organization. They are mutually constitutive. Hence, there may be significant differences between disciplinary scientific practices as well as between national science systems (countries). It reveals a lot about how alleged breaches of integrity and misconduct are experienced, detected, reported, processed, registered and reacted upon.
Starting from a state of the art of what has been measured in previous research, we focused on the biases that have to be taken into account when measuring the extent and incidence of misconduct. Besides a discussion on issues related to the use of official statistics, self-report studies and reputational biases we reflect on the conceptual issues embedded in the process of registration and their consequences for registering practices in administrative procedures. In a next step, we discuss the separate methodologies of the partners involved in this deliverable and the results that were obtained. This report wraps up with a concluding part, reflecting on future directions for research on this topic and the data sources that are useful to measure misconduct in science.

Eventology of multivariate statistics
Eventology and mathematical eventology
Philosophical eventology and philosophy of probability
Practical eventology
Eventology of safety
Eventological economics and psychology
Mathematics in the humanities, socio-economic and natural sciences
Financial and actuarial mathematics
Multivariate statistical analysis
Multivariate complex analysis
Decision-making under risk and uncertainty
Risk measurement and risk models
Theory of fuzzy events and generalized theory of uncertainty
System analysis and events management

EEC'2016 ~ workshop on axiomatizing experience and chance, and Hilbert's sixth problem

With topics from quantum physics, probability and believability to economics, sociology and psychology, the workshop will be intended for an interdisciplinary discussion on mathematical theories of experience and chance. Topics of discussion include the results, thoughts and ideas on axiomatization of the eventological theory of experience and chance in the framework of the decision of Hilbert sixth problem.
Eventology of experience and chance
Beleivability theory and statistics of experience
Probability theory and statistics of chance
Axiomatizing experience and chance

We examine the effects of interviewer-respondent familiarity on both response patterns and rates of item nonresponse when self-administered questions (SAQs) are used. We use SAQ data from a survey in which the researchers experimentally ensured that there would be varying degrees of familiarity between interviewers and respondents. Our results reveal only minimal differences in response patterns by degree of prior acquaintance between interviewer and respondent, indicating that SAQs are effective at eliminating potential bias stemming from such relationships. Our results for item nonresponse depend on how we measure the relationship between interviewer and respondent; but in all cases, it is clear that prior knowledge of one another, far from harmful, leads to low nonresponse rates to SAQs. Thus, researchers using SAQs may not need to adhere to the norm that interviewers and respondents must be strangers, with practical and cost-effective consequences for data collection.

We propose an adaptive data collection procedure for call prioritization in the context of computer-assisted telephone interview surveys. Our procedure is adaptive in the sense that the effort assigned to a sample unit may vary from one unit to another and may also vary during data collection. The goal of an adaptive procedure is usually to increase quality for a given cost or, alternatively, to reduce cost for a given quality. The quality criterion often considered in the literature is the nonresponse bias of an estimator that is not adjusted for nonresponse. Although the reduction of the nonresponse bias is a desirable goal, we argue that it is not a useful criterion to use at the data collection stage of a survey because the bias that can be removed at this stage through an adaptive collection procedure can also be removed at the estimation stage through appropriate nonresponse weight adjustments. Instead, we develop a procedure of call prioritization that, given the selected sam...

Migration statistics are known to be the most challenging aspect of demographic accounting. While continuing efforts to harmonise definitions and find new data sources have certainly improved the availability and quality of information on migratory flows, coherence/consistency in national and international migration data may still be the exception rather than the rule. Several research projects in recent years have helped by improving migration statistics, detecting alternative sources, sharing best practice or proposing estimation methods which address the quality and completeness of migration data. This paper explores the possible means offered by the research outcomes of dealing with the inherent uncertainty of migration data, and their potential use in the regular production and/or validation of official migration statistics.

This is a further formation of the theory of experience and chance. My previous works are devoted to the elements of this new theory, which can also be called the theory of co∼events, or the certainty theory. The theory is a synthesis of two dual theories: Kolmogorov's theory of probability and the believability theory based on the axiomatics, which is a non-trivial extension of Kolmogorov's axiomatics. In my paper " Theory of dual co∼event-based means " (2016), the concepts of two dual co∼event-based means of one co∼event are introduced (the bra-mean and the ket-mean). Here I first suggest the definition of the unifying mean of one co∼event (the bra-ket-mean), and then I enter the general definition of the bra-ket-mean for a finite set of co∼events. The mean co∼event-based characteristics of co∼events play the same role in the theory of experience and chance as the mean numerical characteristics of random variables — in the probability theory, or the mean characteristics of events — in the eventological theory.

Statisticians are under pressure to innovate, partly due to shrinking budgets and the call to do more with less, but also due to technological advances and emergence of new actors promising to produce
more accurate and timely statistics with what has come to be known as “big data”. This raises the question, how do new forms of data and methods become legitimate and official? We approach this
question by conceiving of official statistics as part of a transnational field in which different factions of actors compete and struggle over the authority to innovate the data and methods that are legitimated to produce official statistics. We consider these struggles as a politics of method that is not reducible to a competition between ideas and words. They are also material insofar as they feature competing digital devices mobilised to demonstrate the validity of new data and methods.
Through two empirical examples, we identify the strategy of reassembling methods to capture how statisticians tame and contain innovations based on big data, especially those introduced by data
scientists, by integrating and simultaneously subordinating them to existing methods. By doing so, we suggest that reassembling is an innovation strategy that secures the relative position of national
and international statisticians within the transnational field of statistics.

In my recent works, I propose a new theory of experience and chance, or the theory of certainties, which is a synthesis of two dual theories: Kolmogorov's theory of probabilities and a new theory of believabilities. The theory of experience and chance is based on axiomatics, adding to the Kolmogorov axiomatics of probability theory an axiom of co~event, a new concept defined as a pair of dual objects, one of which serves as a Kolmogorov event in probability space and the other - as an event in the dualistic believability space. One of my papers gives a theory of dual co~event-based means and examples of its use for processing
statistics of ``approving voting'' in elections and in forestry. In this paper, I will go into more detail in examples of processing the statistics
of ``approving voting'' in forestry, where a group of forestry experts is actually engaged in ``approving voting'' when they label the trees of the
forest, labelling those that according to their opinions must be felling. My goal is to show in these examples that the theory of experience and
chance is an effective tool for constructing co~evnts models of experts' behavior in different fields.

When survey respondents answer survey questions, they can also produce "paradata" : behavioral evidence about their response process. The study reported here demonstrates that two kinds of respondent paradata -fluency of speech and gaze direction during answers -identify answers that are likely to be problematic, as measured by changes in answers during the interview or afterward on a post-interview questionnaire. Answers with disfluencies were less reliable both face to face and on the telephone than fluent answers, and particularly diagnostic of unreliability face to face. Interviewers' responsivity can affect both the prevalence and potential diagnosticity of paradata: both disfluent speech and gaze aversion were more frequent and diagnostic in conversational interviews, where interviewers could provide clarification if respondents requested it or the interviewer judged it was needed, than in strictly standardized interviews where clarification was not provided even if the respondent asked for it.

The aim of this paper is to assess the feasibility of employing novel methodologies for producing high quality Official Statistics based on Big Data. Big Data can be described as high volume, high velocity and high variety of information that require new methods of processing. Big Data is such a rich source of data that the Official Statistics community cannot ignore.

Official statistics are statistics published by government agencies or other public bodies that aim to response to policy needs. They are based almost exclusively on survey data collections and administrative data. On the other hand, Big Data challenge the way we think about data assets, the sources we collect them from and the way we analyze them. This illustrates that paradigms are shifting, since a reverse approach of designing statistics is being applied. With Big Data, it is fundamental to explore the vast amounts of data available first and then to decide on the quantities to be measured. Thus, inference techniques used for Official Statistics will need to make a shift too.

In this paper, we explore the potential of using Big Data sources as input for supplemeting or replacing Official Statistics is examined. The work is carried out under the framework of a European Commission / Eurostat project. Five sources are examined: (a) the Automatic Identification System (AIS) records for replacing Official Maritime Transport Statistics on vessel movement, (b) a classifieds site concerning house sales and rental prices in order to produce Housing Price Official Statistics, (c) the Facebook and Twitter content to produce well-being quality of life measures, complementary to Official Statistics, (d) Credit card transaction data for supplementing consumption expenditure statistics and (e) the ‘‘δι@ύγεια’’ site publishing government expenditure decisions for national accounting purposes.

The potential of using the selected Big Data sources as input of Official Statistics is investigated in terms of the quality of the statistics they produce. The quality of the data is disscussed according to the dimensions defined by the European Statistical System, namely: a) relevance, b) accuracy, c) timeliness and puctuality, d) accessibility and clarity and e) coherence. The cost involved in the production prossess is also discussed.

The evaluation of the effect of methodological restrictions on the overall quality of the statistics produced reveals several potential benefits as well as disadvantages. Among all, Big Data are characterized by the amount of information and the frequency at which they are produced. The high geographical coverage and the accuracy of the data, are some of the pros. On the other hand, a major issue concerning Big Data is the accessibility due to confidentiality or other policies. In addition, the volume of the data increases further the processing needs for validation. It is highlighted, that the quantities produced can be used supplementary to the respective Official Statistics’ indicators, while at most of the cases, it is not feasible to replace them. However, exploiting the vast ammounts of data available in a methodologically sound way may enhance the fast production of low cost and high quality official statistics. That is, Big Data is a field that requires new tailored methods to accelerate the analysis of large amount of data.

EUROSTAT L-2920 Luxembourg -Tel. (352) 43 01-1 -www.europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat/ Eurostat is the Statistical Office of the European Communities. Its task is to gather and analyse figures from the different European statistical offices in order to provide comparable and harmonised data for the European Union to use in the definition, implementation and analysis of Community policies. Its statistical products and services are also of great value to Europe's business community, professional organisations, academics, librarians, NGOs, the media and citizens.

Food security prediction has been challenging aspects in developing countries particularly in African countries such as Tanzania. Consequently, government lack proper stimulated information that is necessary in making decision on efforts required for stabilizing food situation and status in their countries. Scientifically it has been observed in research and practical that this is caused by lack of proper mechanisms, tools and approach suitable for modeling and predicting food status among households. This paper proposes a logistic regression based model for analysis and prediction of food security status. The proposed model is empirically test using practical data collected from one district in Tanzania.

SDMX (Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange) is not just a standard format for data exchange but it is in reality a set of technical and statistical standards and guidelines, IT architecture and IT tools with the objective of exchange and sharing of statistical data and metadata, efficiently. SDMX Content-Oriented Guidelines (COG) recommend practices for creating interoperable data and metadata sets using SDMX technical standards, focusing on the harmonization of specific concepts that are common to a large number of statistical domains. As well as commonly understood data structure definitions (DSDs) allows mapping the exchanged data messages from and to internal statistical databases and systems, also commonly understood metadata structure definitions (MSDs) allow mapping metadata from and to statistical information systems that may be technologically or linguistic diverse. To establish these common structures, cross-domain concepts that are commonly used in SDMX messages have been identified.

This note reviews insightful observations by K.R.W. (Ken) Brewer, found in his book published in 2002, with regard to the degree of heteroscedasticity to be expected for survey populations. Details and implications are noted. -

--
-- Further please note:
The first sentence of the introduction could read as follows: "Heteroscedasticity, the change in variance of Y|predicted-y, or epsilon|predicted-y (in the simplest case, this would be for V(Y|x)), is very often referred to as a 'problem' that needs to be 'solved' or 'corrected.'" But heteroscedasticity in regression is a feature, not a bug.
-

For more, see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352134279_When_Would_Heteroscedasticity_in_Regression_Occur
...

/// Also note that delta at the top of page 5 is just a specific use of autocorrelation.

The variance and covariances only come from 'within cluster,' where here the 'cluster' is one datum of y for a given x (or for a given predicted y).

We consider the interoperability of information systems within a distributed environment, such as across statistical organisations of the Member States of the European Union. Within a logical layer between the physical storage of the data (server) and the presentation of the data to the user (client), we introduce a conceptual data model that can facilitate interoperability between a number of different data models and structures in a distributed environment. For interoperability, we discuss a micro-macrometadata model that can interface readily with data warehouses and other cube object models and can exploit the accommodation of the operational metadata necessary for statistical query processing.

The timely, accurate monitoring of social indicators, such as poverty or inequality, at a fine grained spatial and temporal scale is a challenging task for official statistics, albeit a crucial tool for understanding social phenomena and policy making. We advocate in this paper that an interdisciplinary approach, combining the body of statistical research in small area estimates with the body of research in social data mining based on big data, can provide novel means to tackle this problem successfully. Big data sensed from the digital breadcrumbs that humans leave behind in their daily activities mediated by the ICT's are in fact providing ever more accurate proxies of social life. Social data mining from these data, coupled with advanced model-based techniques for fine-grained estimates, have the potential of providing us with a novel microscope for understanding social complexity.

Errata brought to my attention:
-- Figures with 'confidence bounds' here are actually curved bounds about prediction intervals for predicted y-values. They would better be called "Prediction Bounds."
-- The "estimated standard error of the random factors of the estimated residuals," should have been designated the "estimated standard deviation of the estimated random factors of the estimated residuals."  That is, the sigmas are standard deviations, as they are not reduced with increased sample size. 
-- This paper is for the prediction or estimation of official statistics.  A better title would be as follows: Use of Ratios for Estimation or Prediction of Official Statistics at a Statistical Agency. 
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From InterStat, 2012, http://interstat.statjournals.net/  -   
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has made good use of available auxiliary data over a number of years, for a variety of surveys on energy sources and consumption, for estimating the statistics that the EIA mission requires. Such use of already available data reduces data collection burden for a given level of accuracy. Many of these instances relate to a single auxiliary variable, and involve some type of ratio. The many uses of ratios at the EIA are both disparate and unifying: disparate in that the applications can appear to be fairly distinct, but unifying in that there are interrelationships between these methods that may be esthetically pleasing, and of practical importance. Better communication and future improvements may be achieved by considering what is different between these methods, and what they have in common. Here we will explore these ideas. -- 

Please note that the illustration near the end is a (much) cropped photo I took of a painting done by my grandfather, Karl H. (Henry) Knaub, more than half of a century before I wrote this paper.
    :-)

3 intermarriage. But where people can report more than one ethnic group, some patterns of marriage include both endogamous and exogamous unions. One might argue that a Maori and Maori-European union is endogamous -that is within-group -mostly because of the historical New Zealand convention of seeing "half-castes" more as Maori than as European. Because of this complexity a clear definition of ethnic intermarriage is not offered. In part, the study is an exploration of what might be considered to be ethnic intermarriage in New Zealand. This paper is divided into three sections. The first is a review of literature on ethnic intermarriage and the transmission of ethnicity to children. The main focus in the section on the transmission of ethnicity is how ethnic intermarriage might influence the ethnicity of children. A key aim of this overall project is to assess how ethnicity might be evolving in New Zealand. Therefore information on how children who have parents from differing ethnic groups construct their ethnicity, or have it constructed for them, is important.