IASS - Small Area Estimation Beyond Traditional Data: Opportunities, Challenges, and Emerging Applications
| Date | 14 Jul 2026 |
| Time | 14:00 CEST - 15:30 CEST |
| Level of instruction | |
| Instructor |
Monica Pratesi
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| Registration fee | |
As data needs become more granular and policy demands more timely and localized statistics, Small Area Estimation (SAE) is evolving to incorporate big data and alternative data sources. Traditional SAE approaches have relied heavily on survey and census data. However, the growing availability of non-traditional sources — including administrative records, satellite imagery, mobile phone data, and citizen-generated data — offers new opportunities to enhance estimation accuracy and relevance at small geographic or demographic scales. This presentation explores the integration of big and alternative data into SAE models, focusing on methodological innovations, practical challenges, and real-world applications. We discuss how these data sources can be used as auxiliary variables, how to address issues of representativeness and bias, and how to balance model complexity with interpretability. Emphasis is placed on ensuring data quality, ethical use, and transparency, with the goal of producing reliable, actionable statistics for unplanned domains and underserved populations.
Instructors
About the instructor
Monica Pratesi is a Full Professor of Statistics at the University of Pisa. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Statistics from the University of Florence in 1993 and is currently a Member of the Scientific Council of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR).
Since 2012, she has been a member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) and served as President of the International Association of Survey Statisticians (IASS), a section of the ISI, from 2021 to 2023.
From 2022 to 2024, she served as Director of the Department for Statistical Production at the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). Prior to this appointment, she was a Member of the Istat Governing Board from 2016 to February 2022. She was also President of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS) from 2016 to 2020 and served on the European Master in Official Statistics (EMOS) Board until the end of 2023.
Her research interests include small area estimation, poverty mapping, citizen data quality, inference for hard-to-reach populations, nonresponse in telephone and web surveys, and the impact of complex survey designs on statistical modelling. She has coordinated several national and international research projects on Small Area Statistics, funded by the European Commission and the Italian Ministry of University and Research. She was the holder of the Jean Monnet Chair “Small Area Methods for Multidimensional Poverty and Living Conditions Indicators in the EU” (SAMPIEU) from 2019 to 2021 (http://sampieuchair.ec.unipi.it).