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WEIGHTING TECHNOLOGY FOR TRANSFORMED SYSTEMS

The Methodology Futures Section has a leadership role in developing methodologies that will be required for the ABS Transformation agenda. One area of development over 2015/16 has been identifying estimation approaches that can reproduce or improve on current methods, while being straightforward to build into systems. This work resulted in a paper presented to the Methodology Advisory Committee on 1 July 2016 entitled "Weighting Technology for Transformed Systems".

The paper focuses on methods that use the well-established Generalised Regression (GREG) approach and that provide estimates as a weighted sum of the survey units. It presents some novel uses of the GREG approach in survey estimation. One example is estimating multiple integrated or modular surveys at the same time in such a way that each survey gives the same estimates for a set of core items. This gives each core item estimate a lower sampling error than would have been obtained from any of the surveys alone. Other examples in the paper include composite estimation, in a form applicable to a variety of continuing surveys where correlations between time points are substantial; and pooling of data over multiple time points to produce more stable estimates.

The versatility of the GREG approach makes it ideal for use in new systems. In 2016/17, Methodology Futures staff are contributing to the building of an Output Estimation capability as members of an Agile team in the Statistical Business Transformation Program.

Further Information
For more information, please contact Philip Bell (methodology@abs.gov.au).

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