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News

New regulatory guidance - experimental statistics 

The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has released a new guidance note about experimental statistics which we encourage everyone producing official statistics to read.

It sets out when and how the experimental statistics label should be used. It is fundamentally about demonstrating that you are developing and improving your statistics and inviting your users to participate in their testing and evaluation.
 
Their new blog also looks to dispel some myths about experimental statistics. Do have a read and share it with colleagues!

OSR has also published an updated policy document on official statistics and National Statistics, and begun a review of the National Statistics Designation.

Do let us know if you have any queries or are interested in feeding in your comments to the review. Email Penny Babb: regulation@statistics.gov.uk.

Information for attendees of the GSS conference 2019

With only a month to go until the GSS conference, here are some key messages from the organising committee:
  • Talk and poster abstracts have been sifted and we can confirm that those who have been successful will already have been informed of this via email. If your poster has been chosen for display, please remember to print it in A2, and if you are not attending the conference, make sure you arrange for it to be brought to the venue on the 1st October 2019.
  • If you are due to attend but have not yet completed your delegate form, please return this as soon as possible. Non-completion of the form may result in you not being allocated to the sessions you are interested in or your dietary requirements not being catered for.
  • Ian Diamond will not be in post as National Statistician by the time of the conference, so we are pleased to be hosting Deputy National Statistician Ian Bell, who will be speaking and presenting the First Annual GSS Awards at the conference in his place. 
We can also reveal more information about the conference’s keynote speeches:
  • John Curtice will be presenting on ‘Public Attitudes towards Post-Brexit Public Policy: First Findings from a Deliberative Poll’. This talk will report the initial findings of a deliberative poll on public attitudes towards some of the policy options in respect of three such subjects, immigration, food policy and consumer regulation
  • Hetan Shah will talk about ‘Reflections on the wider data landscape’. Hetan will cover developments happening in the world of data beyond official statistics, and some reflections on the implications for official statisticians.
  • Gillian Docherty’s talk will be titled ‘#BeyondData’. As a theme for DataFest in 2020, Gillian will share her insights of what #BeyondData is, how data and it’s use are shaping many aspects of our lives, how it can be used for benefit or for harm and what we must take responsibility for doing what is right.  
 For the most up-to-date information about the conference, please see the GSS conference event page.

Shortlisting complete for the GSS awards!

Thank you to everyone who submitted a nomination. We received 66 nominations from across government highlighting the excellent work taking place across the GSS.

We have shortlisted 17 nominations with the winners set to be announced at the awards ceremony on the 1 October.

New Harmonisation newsletter

The GSS Harmonisation team and the Harmonisation Champions Network (HCN) have published their first quarterly newsletter to better share information to improve comparability and coherence across departments. For more information, contact your Harmonisation champion and they can cascade a copy to you.

Do you know who your departmental Harmonisation champion is to go to for all comparability matters? If not check out our list of Champions.

Blogs

Sharing our knowledge

Nicki Verdeli from the Best Practice and Impact division explains the aims of a new series of sharing seminar webinars, available to anyone in civil service sector who produces statistics.

How we listened to users to improve housing and planning statistics

Esther Sutherland & Ian Boreham explain the results of their online user engagement survey on housing statistics, and what the next steps are to improve these statistics in the future.

Events

See the Best Practice and Impact division at upcoming conferences!

The Best Practice and Impact division will have a stall at the upcoming Royal Statistical Society conference on 2 to 5 September and the Government Economic & Social research Conference on 27 September.

Come along and say hi and see our range of guidance, training and support. Plus be in with a chance to win one of our converted travel mugs or water bottles!

Do you want to help us to improve statistical publications?


The Good Practice Team facilitate regular peer review workshops to help improve statistical releases. In these workshops, participants review a statistical publication and suggest improvements.

Places are still available for the peer review workshop on 17 October in Newport and 14 November in London, so if you would like to get involved in this or any of the upcoming workshops, please email gsshelp@statistics.gov.uk

Vacancies

Opportunities across the GSS

Take a look on the GSS website for information about Statistical OfficerHigher Statistical Officer and Senior Statistical Officer roles available across the GSS.

Closing date for these vacancies is 26 September 2019.

You can view all current vacancies on the GSS website.

Learning and Development

Civil Service Learning Mentoring

The Civil Service Learning team are looking for mentors of all grades within the Civil Service to support their offline mentoring service.

This mentoring scheme is in place until the new Learning Platform for Government (LPG) is fully launched across all departments and professions. Details for mentoring can be found on Civil Service Learning (select mentoring resources), which includes guidance and application forms to become a mentee or mentor.
 
Please send completed forms to contactus@cslearning.gov.uk 
 

Outlier detection methods for Census data

Methodology Division at ONS have been building on work by Southampton University to investigate and implement new outlier detection (OD) methods for use in Census 2021 as a tool for quick identification of areas where additional quality assurance effort should be invested.We implemented several OD methods using Spark and PySpark and tested them on the Census microdata in the ONS Data Access Platform.

The two methods that showed most potential to help the process of quality assurance of Census data were based on the ideas of Pattern based Outlier Detector and of the Outlier Detector for Mixed Attribute Datasets.

The first method is based on modelling the variables using machine learning models (we used Gradient Boosted Machines) and comparing predictions with the original values. The second method (ODMAD) computes outliers based on infrequently co-occurring combinations of values (so called infrequent itemsets).
 
The methods were applied to detect individual anomalous records, as well as groups of records with unusual characteristics that are worth flagging up. They provide unique insight into the data, could be scaled to millions of records and adapted to other large datasets of similar nature, e.g. other survey data.

 

How to get the most out of Slack!


Slack is a fantastic collaboration tool which allows you to connect to colleagues from across the GSS. The Good Practice team have created some guidance on how to get the most of Slack. We hope you find this useful!

If you haven't joined, it's really easy - simply create a Slack account, add yourself to the GSS workspace (gov-stats-service.slack.com) with your government email address. You must sign-up with your government email address even if departmental rules mean you will be accessing slack from a personal device.
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