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Analytical Services

Objectives
The Analytical Services Program develops new analytical products and provides analysis services to producers and users of social and economic data. Its major areas of focus are time series analysis (including seasonal adjustment); the construction and interpretation of socio-economic indexes; the development of data confidentialisation methodology; and general modelling and analysis of data from statistical collections. The program also provides a statistical consultancy service to other government agencies.

By providing new and innovative analytical products, the program contributes to improving the ABS’s statistical outputs and helps to inform evidence based decision making. Data confidentialisation methods, especially when applied to microdata files, allow researchers outside the ABS to construct analytical outputs of their own choice.

Time series in seasonally adjusted and trend form are an important input to policy formation, decision making and research in government, academia and the private sector. Government users include Australian government economic policy agencies (especially the Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia), State Treasuries, the Australian Government, State and Territory Governments, and local government service delivery agencies.

Outputs
The main outputs of the Analytical Services Program include specialist analytical support for improving existing ABS methodology, and the development of new analytical products for potential dissemination to data users and others in the National Statistical Service. The program develops a range of analytical products including new time series, analytical frameworks, databases and models to measure socio­economic concepts. The program undertakes ongoing methodological development work to improve user access to information in microdata files and tabular outputs while protecting the confidentiality of individual providers.

The outputs of this work are disseminated via a series of Research Papers (ABS cat. no. 1351.0). These papers may contain analytical work in preliminary stages, in order to stimulate discussion and feedback. Time series products and analyses appear in many ABS publications on a regular basis.

Developments
The main medium-term developments in the program are to:

• research techniques for improving the seasonal adjustment processes by applying appropriate transformation and automated modelling of time series – due June 2013.
• construct and analyse socio-economic indexes from the 2011 Census of Population and Housing – due December 2012
• develop data confidentiality methods, and implement a web-based application, that will enable researchers to remotely access, process and analyse detailed microdata from household surveys, administrative and linked data sources – June 2013
• develop methodology for linkage of multiple datasets and analysis of linked data to support statistical data integration – due December 2013
• undertake analyses that demonstrate the power of datasets held by the ABS, including administrative data and transactional data – due June 2014