A conference devoted to register and big data opens today

The conference is held on the World Statistics Day, which is celebrated under the aegis of the UN on 20 October. The slogan of the World Statistics Day – better data, better lives – is the theme running through the presentations of this year’s conference and the current activities of statisticians in Estonia.

“The current major project of the official statistics of Estonia consists in preparing for the 2020 register-based population and housing census,” noted Andres Oopkaup, Director General of Statistics Estonia. “This not only entails an essentially new level in data collection and statistical analyses, but also co-operation and synergy between national databases and Statistics Estonia,” he added. “Another new challenge for statisticians across the world is big data, which have already evoked both optimism and deep scepticism from people”, said Oopkaup.

The conference features several presentations devoted to big data, including presentations describing actual experience both in Estonia and abroad. When talking about big data, Kaja Sõstra, President of the Estonian Statistical Society and Head of the Methodology and Analysis Department of Statistics Estonia, pointed out that the amount of such relatively easily accessible and varied data entices researchers to use them. “Optimists hope that big data will solve most of the problems related to data collection and that future statistics will mainly be based on big data,” noted Sõstra, but she also added that a number of technological and methodological issues need to be solved before big data can be adopted. “The greatest problem is that usually the population covered by big data differs greatly from the population that needs to be studied,” explained Sõstra. She added that until it is not clear what the ratio of these populations is, what part of the population under study is covered by the population reflected in big data, and what the joint distribution of these populations is, big data cannot be used to answer research questions about real life. “Finding a solution to these problems is probably the topic that statisticians are going to be working on these days,” concluded Sõstra.

The conference is free for all attendees and is held at Viljandi Gymnasium (Hariduse 2, Viljandi).