Assemble your team!

We are pleased to announce that Eurostat is organising the European Statistics Awards Programme, with competitions in the fields of nowcasting and web intelligence. By “nowcasting” we mean the forecasting of statistical indicators with extremely 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. 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.

Launch of the first European Statistics Awards for Nowcasting
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 European Statistics Awards for Nowcasting.

TIMELINE
The competition will begin on 1 September 2022 and will run for eight months, until 30 April 2023.

TEAMS
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 EUR 8,000 per nowcasted time series. Your team could thus win up to EUR 24,000 in this round in case you rank first for all three time series.

TOPICS
As part of the competition, we expect the submission of at least six point estimates of the monthly time series over a period of eight months for at least five countries. Submitting estimates for all eight months (and for 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).
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
(Eurobase code: TOUR_OCC_NIM, UNIT:NR, NACE R2: I551-I553, INDIC TO: B006)
Topic 2 Production volume in industry – PVI
(Eurobase code: STS_INPR_M, INDIC_BT: PROD, NACE_R2: B-D, S_ADJ:SCA, UNIT:I15)
Topic 3 Producer prices in industry (domestic market) – PPI
(Eurobase codes: STS_INPPD_M, INDIC_BT: PRIN, NACE_R2: B-E36, S_ADJ: NSA, UNIT: I15)

Find out more: https://statistics-awards.eu/