Big Data Initiatives in Official Statistics
Lilli Japec, Lars E. Lyberg · 2020
This chapter concentrates on one of these developments: Big Data and its potential impact on current and future statistics production. It describes some characteristics of the changing survey landscape and gives examples of initiatives that are currently under way. The chapter also describes various strategies to incorporate Big Data in official statistics. It provides examples of actual attempts at producing statistics using Big Data thereby reducing costs, combining Big Data with administrative data and sample surveys to improve statistics, and using Big Data to explore new topics or refine existing concepts. The chapter discusses the quality aspects of introducing Big Data. Researchers have attempted to develop frameworks and other quality assessment methods. It also discusses some legal issues that Big Data might generate and how these problems might differ across countries and regions. The chapter speculates about future developments in data collection and analysis for official statistics in an era of Big Data.