Eurostat is pleased to announce that it’s organising the European Statistics Awards Programme, with competitions in the fields of nowcasting and web intelligence. The main goal of the competition is to discover promising methodologies and data sources that could be used to improve the production of European statistics.
Within the awards programme, which will run until the end of 2025, we are planning three yearly rounds of competitions on nowcasting. The European Statistics Awards for Web Intelligence will be launched later this autumn.
Better timeliness is a recurring demand by policymakers and other users of European statistics. Improving timeliness requires continuous efforts involving a broad range of stakeholders and is a key driver for innovation in European statistics. New approaches based on advanced modelling (possibly using alternative, almost real-time, information) have an important potential to give us accurate estimates of key indicators much faster than before.
Therefore, we are now launching the first round of the European Statistics Awards for Nowcasting.
The competition will begin on 1 September 2022 and will run for eight months until 30 April 2023.
By ‘nowcasting’, we understand the forecasting of statistical indicators within very tight timeliness – typically before the reference period is over. Nowcasting methods are seen as possible cost-efficient, robust and generic approaches providing solutions to cover unmet needs.
Teams will compete along two dimensions: the ability of their model to deliver accurate estimates within a very short time span and the potential of their methods to be reproduced and extended to European statistics production.
As part of the competition, we expect the submission of at least 6-point estimates of the monthly time series over eight months for at least five (5) countries. Submitting estimates for all eight months (and more than five countries) will increase your likelihood of ranking first for the accuracy award. To be in the running for the reproducibility award, your team should also submit detailed methodological descriptions (including code).
The contest is open to teams of up to five persons from various backgrounds and disciplines with skills in time series analysis, forecasting or nowcasting. The competition is an excellent opportunity to apply your knowledge of econometric time series modelling in a real-life situation and to win up to € 8 000 per time series in case you rank first on both accuracy (€ 3 000) and reproducibility (€ 5 000). Your team could thus win up to € 24 000 in this round, in case you rank first for all three-time series.
In the first competition round, the teams will have the opportunity to submit nowcasts for one or more of the following three European statistics time series:
- Topic 1: Tourism number of nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments
- Topic 2: Production volume in industry
- Topic 3: Producer prices in industry
To learn more about the competition, time plan, evaluation, and awards, please visit the competition website at https://statistics-awards.eu/, where we will progressively make more information available as the 1 September start date approaches.
For the first round of nowcasting awards, 12 prizes will be awarded; four for each time series, including three for the solutions that provide the most accurate estimates and one for the solution that has the best potential for reproducibility and scaling up to regular production.
- Accuracy award
First Prize: € 3 000, Second Prize: € 2 000, Third Prize: € 1 000
- Reproducibility award
First Prize: € 5 000
In addition, teams will have the opportunity to have their work disseminated via the Eurostat communication channels and may be given the chance to present their solutions at events organised by Eurostat.
Stay tuned for more information and follow us via our social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
European Statistics Awards Programme - managed by the Jožef Stefan Institute for Eurostat under contract numbers 2020.0411 and 2020.0412.
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