Mr. Vu Thanh Liem, Deputy Director General of GSO delivered the opening speech at the workshop
On the morning of December 21st, 2018, in Hanoi, the General Statistics Office (GSO) held the scientific workshop with the topic “Results of test collection of information on consumer goods and services on e-commerce websites serving the calculation of CPI”.
Mr. Vu Thanh Liem, Deputy Director General of GSO, chaired the workshop. Attending this event were representatives of some international organizations in Vietnam; representative of the Faculty of Statistics, the National Economics University; representatives of leaders and staffs of units under the GSO.
In his opening speech of the workshop, Mr. Vu Thanh Liem, Deputy Director General emphasized that along with the development of the Fourth Industry Revolution (Industry 4.0), the application and exploitation of Big Data for the official statistical activities was an inevitable trend in modern statistical activities. The United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) created the Global Working Group (GWG) on Big Data for official statistics to further investigate the benefits and challenges of Big Data, including the potential for monitoring and reporting on the sustainable development goals (SDGs). GWG studies and adequately address issues pertaining to methodology, quality, technology, data access, legislation, privacy, management and finance, and provide adequate cost-benefit analyses on the use of Big Data. Up to now, there have been many countries implementing research projects on exploiting and using Big Data to produce statistics on price, migration and tourism … Recognizing the great benefits and challenges of exploiting and using Big Data to produce official statistics, from the end of 2015, leaders of the GSO agreed with the proposal and assigned the Institute of Statistical Science to study Big Data for producing official statistics, including the test collection of information on retail prices from Big Data to compile CPI.
Mr. Nguyen Van Doan, Director of Institute of Statistical Science (GSO) presented the experiment results of collecting information
At the workshop, Mr. Nguyen Van Doan, Director of Institute of Statistical Science (GSO) presented the following contents: (1) Overview of exploiting Big Data to produce official statistics; (2) Results of collecting the information on retail prices of consumer goods and services on e-commerce websites. The Institute of Statistical Science collected online retail prices of 418 consumer goods and services out of 654 level-5 items in the basket of selected consumer goods and services for consumer price survey. Regarding the technology, the Institute of Statistical Science designed a software based on Web Crawler and Web Scraper technology to collect, process data on retail prices of items traded over the Internet on 44 websites managed by the Ministry of Industry and Trade. The data on retail prices of 418 consumer goods and services collected from websites is the results of initial research on Big Data, but it is possible to confirm that the exploitation and use of Big Data to produce official statistics in some areas are completely feasible. However, to effectively exploit and use Big Data to supplement and replace traditional data sources, there are still many challenges, requiring the attention and drastic direction of GSO’s leaders as well as active and responsible participation of related units.
Also at the workshop, participants gave their opinions to discuss the methods and results of Big Data exploitation in order to obtain the most accurate data source ensuring reliability for statistical work.
Speaking at the end of the workshop, Mr. Vu Thanh Liem, Deputy Director General of GSO highly appreciated the research results of the Institute of Statistical Science and recorded the Institute’s recommendations to the GSO and proposed the Institute to continue to improve research results and research more on Big Data in other areas of statistics. The Deputy Director General of the GSO thanked the representatives of international organizations and hoped them to support the GSO in Big Data and thanked the participants of the workshop.