A University statistician is part of a team from Southampton, the University of Bristol and the Office for National Statistics that presented a prestigious ‘Read Paper’ at the Royal Statistical Society’s (RSS) International Conference in Manchester.
The paper, which is co-authored by Paul Smith, Associate Professor in Official Statistics at the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI), sets out new research in the field of time series analysis and decision theory.
Mr Smith says: “This new methodology is useful when deciding whether to embark on a more rapid collection of statistical data or when evaluating whether past changes were worthwhile. For example, there has been a long-running question of whether a monthly Labour Force Survey would be worth its cost, and applying this method should tell us.
“The technique also has great potential in the fusion of data sets from multiple sources such as turnover information collected by the Office for National Statistics’ monthly business survey and by monthly, quarterly and annual VAT returns to HM Revenue and Customs.”
Read (Discussion) Papers are a long established tradition of the RSS which dates back to the 1830s. They go through extensive peer review and then, if selected for reading and discussion, are presented at a meeting of the Society. Paul Smith worked on the research with Professor Guy Nason, from the Institute of Statistics in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol and Dr Ben Powell, Research Associate, also from the Institute of Statistics at Bristol.
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