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1 Introduction
Pages 5-14

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From page 5...
... each business day, a labor market dashboard on the BLS website is updated with information compiled from a multitude of sources that provide various readings on the employment situation in the United States, including the number of jobs, new hires, job openings, layoffs, job leavers, and claims for unemployment insurance, as well as the number of business establishments, new businesses created, and businesses that were dissolved. In this not-too-distant future, website visitors may see changes since the beginning of the year, beginning of the month, the previous day, or over any time period they select.
From page 6...
... The full statement of task for the panel is shown in Box 1-1. The goal of the panel's first report was to review the changing social and technological environment and its effect on the survey paradigm that underlies many federal statistical programs, as well as the potential of making greater use of other data sources, such as government administrative data and private-sector data for federal statistics.
From page 7...
... To fulfill their missions, federal statistical agencies must uphold and express these principles. Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2017c)
From page 8...
... More specifically, the first report will discuss •  ederal statistical agencies' current paradigm for producing national sta f tistics and challenges to this paradigm; •  ederal statistical agencies' legal frameworks and mechanisms for pro f tecting the privacy and confidentiality of their data and challenges to those frameworks and mechanisms; •  ederal statistical agencies' legal frameworks and mechanisms for pro f viding access to underlying data to researchers to foster transparency, replicability of statistical series, and for policy and social science research and challenges to those frameworks and mechanisms; •  ederal statistical agencies' access to alternative sources of data for fed f eral statistical programs, the organizational structures sustaining access, and the impediments to access; Although the states and private-sector firms play important roles in working with the statistical agencies, those entities do not have the same mission as that of federal statistical agencies. The panel's outreach and discussions with a variety of private-sector firms revealed that even the large amounts of data firms have that could be useful for federal statistics are unlikely to replace federal statistics; indeed, firms often rely on federal
From page 9...
... Second Report The second report will propose approaches for implementing a new para digm that would combine diverse data sources from government and private sector sources with state-of-the art methods to give users richer and more reliable statistics. The second report will •  ssess alternative approaches for implementing a new paradigm that a would combine diverse data sources from government and private-sector sources; •  valuate concepts, metrics, and methods for assessing the quality and e utility of alternative data sources, analogous to the "total error" framework used for surveys; •  valuate statistical models for combining data from multiple sources; e •  xamine metrics and methods for evaluating the quality of combined e information estimates; •  valuate alternative designs of statistical processes that foster privacy e protections, transparency, objectivity, timeliness, replicability, efficiency, and continuity of statistical series; and • dentify priorities for research needed for federal statistical agencies to i advance a multiple data-sources paradigm.
From page 10...
... reviewed the current ability of the federal statistical agencies to access and use administrative and other data sources to enhance federal statistics. In our review of the potential of various data sources in our first report, we noted that some administrative and private-sector
From page 11...
... Some data sources, such as those from various Internet sources, require very different processing than the survey data currently collected by federal statistical agencies. We discussed the potential benefits, as well as the risks, of using these data sources in combination with surveys to enhance federal statistics, and we recommended that federal statistical agencies systematically review their programs and these new data sources to assess their use for enhancing federal statistics.
From page 12...
... 102) We concluded that such an entity was needed to create a 21st-century statistical information infrastructure given the decentralized nature of the federal statistical system and the difficulties that face statistical agencies in accessing, evaluating, and using a variety of administrative and privatesector data sources for statistical purposes.
From page 13...
... REPORT STRUCTURE As detailed in the panel's statement of task (Box 1-1) , this second report focuses on implementation of a new approach for producing federal statistics from multiple data sources, including evaluating quality metrics, statistical models for combining data, and methods for preserving privacy.
From page 14...
... In Chapter 2, we build on the brief overview of statistical methods for combining multiple data sources in the first report and describe issues with linking different data sources, as well as techniques for analyzing combined data sources, and note areas where further research is needed. In Chapter 3, we provide an overview of the issues and requirements related to IT infrastructure that federal statistical agencies will need to consider when implementing a paradigm for using multiple data sources for federal statistics.


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