ONS and Turing Institute Partner for Faster Stats
June 14 2021
In the UK, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and The Alan Turing Institute are teaming up to produce 'close to real-time economic statistics', which they say will 'help track changes in the economy while preserving privacy'.
The Alan Turing Institute is the country's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. During an initial two-year period, the strategic partnership will see ONS economists, analysts and data scientists working closely with a team of Turing researchers. Three projects are already on the drawing board:
- Understanding Economic Networks - applying a variety of 'cutting-edge' data science techniques to the study of transactions between companies in near real time, and helping the ONS to understand the impact of seasonal patterns and one-off events like Covid and Brexit.
- Economic 'nowcasting' - bringing together a range of new data to create economic models in 'close to real time', tracking changes in retail prices, household spending and income at a detailed local level; and
- Synthetic data and privacy preservation - developing tools to allow the sharing of private datasets with a wider range of stakeholders, while preserving privacy. The organisations say this can be done using synthetic data generators which offer a private way to generate data, whilst preserving statistical features in the original data set.
UK National Statistician Professor Sir Ian Diamond says of the news: 'For some time now we've been combining 'faster' data from multiple sources, allowing us to rapidly track important changes in our economy in near-real-time and produce stats with deeper insight. The pandemic has turbocharged this kind of work and demonstrated just how vital it is. Our new partnership with the Alan Turing Institute will be key as we continue this journey to harness the power of new forms of data. Together we aim to provide higher quality, more detailed and much faster estimates of changes in our economy and society to help inform policy and improve lives'.
Adrian Smith, Director of The Alan Turing Institute, comments: 'High quality data is crucial to the future growth, efficiency and stability of the UK economy. This exciting new strategic partnership gives us a new opportunity to work closely with ONS to provide timely insights enabling data driven decisions with the potential to improve our socio-economic wellbeing'.
Web sites:
www.turing.ac.uk and
www.ons.gov.uk .
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
