Proposal Description

In today's data-driven world, the integration of Mobile Network Operator (MNO) data with other non-MNO sources presents an unprecedented opportunity for statistical production. MNO-MINDS is a two-year Eurostat founded project designed to explore innovative methodologies for harnessing the potential of MNO data alongside conventional statistics, aiming to provide guidelines and training to strengthen the European Statistical System. This project strongly believes that MNO data will be used to produce regular official statistics and aims at guiding and facilitating this process, by proposing general sound solutions to address the integration of this data source with other non-MNO data into a coherent statistical production process. New reasonable integration scenarios and data sources will overcome and enrich the current situations and all the developed methodologies will be driven by real situations of particular relevance in the official statistics domain, in order to identify, model, and adjust the main sources of uncertainty arising from the data and the integration process. Open source implementation of methodologies will be released to ensure its reproducibility. Central to MNO-MINDS approach is the testing and demonstration of methodologies using both real and synthetic data across a spectrum of use cases. Among these reasonable and recommendable scenarios the project has envisaged the availability of a new ad-hoc survey intentionally designed with the purpose of integrating and improving the statistics based on MNO data. Furthermore, the project suggests a sustainable win-to-win partnership between MNOs and National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), able to guarantee data confidentiality, individual privacy, and business secrecy. Beyond MNO data integration, MNO-MINDS extends its scope to prepare the ESS for the utilization of new data sources in official statistics, once the revised Regulation on European statistics comes into force. This entails recommendations for updating business and information architectures, enhancing the quality aspects of experimental statistics, optimizing standardization in data usage, and streamlining work arrangements within the ESS framework. Scope of this session is to disseminate the research results of the project, encouraging the floor discussion on them and sharing the research experiences. Four talk sections are envisaged: the first will be focused on which data to combine with Mobile Phone Data, landscaping the most promising sources and associated challenges; the second will deal with methods for producing official statistics from mobile network data; the third talk will debate if a traditional survey can reduce the bias of mobile phone data based statistics; the last will show an application to a concrete case where the MNO data is able to enrich the output currently produced by official statistics, highlighting advantages and risks .