Analysis

Description:

This paper analyzes the revisions of eight seasonally adjusted labour force series during recession and non-recession periods. The four seasonal adjustment methods applied are X-11 and X-11-ARIMA using either concurrent or forecast seasonal factors. The series are seasonally adjusted with these four methodologies according to both a multiplicative and an additive decomposition model. The results indicate that the X-11-ARIMA concurrent adjustment yields the smallest revisions both during recession and non-recession periods regardless of the decomposition model used.

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This study purports to assess whether there are temporal relationships between Unemployment Insurance Beneficiaries, Total Unemployment, Job Losers and Job Leavers in Canada using univariate and multivariate time series methods. The results indicate that during 1975-82 the Unemployment Insurance Beneficiaries series leads: (1) Total Unemployment by one month and (2) Job Leavers by two months. On the other hand, there are evidence of a feedback relationship between Unemployment Insurance Beneficiaries and Job Losers.

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Thirty basic principles of questionnaire design are presented covering the content, wording, format, and testing of questionnaires. The extent to which the questionnaire is an integral part of the survey is emphasized as is consideration of its relationship with other aspects of survey design.

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Twelve administrative data files are reviewed to determine if some of them could be used to derive migration data, in case the universality of the currently used family allowance files be limited, as a result of federal legislation.

It is found that none of the twelve files have strengths and weaknesses strictly comparable to those of the family allowance files. Further developments of the Health Care, and to a lesser extent the Old Age Security files are highly recommended.

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In Canada, provincial and federal demographers have attempted to use various sets of administrative data to estimate migration flows. This paper presents the development of intra-provincial migration estimates using driver’s licence data in Ontario. An evaluation of these migration estimates has been carried out by comparing with those derived from the income tax data by Statistics Canada. Both files provide equally good and complimentary estimates of intra-provincial migration.

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This paper examines the use of administrative files from Alberta’s Health Care Insurance Plans combined with Vital Statistics data as inputs for estimating population. Results, which are presented and compared with Census data, indicate that Health Care data can be used to produce accurate population estimates at the provincial level and for smaller areas such as census divisions and municipalities.

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The accuracy of small area population estimates derived from a regression based model is heavily dependent on the ability of the indicator data selected to accurately reflect population change. Hence, prior knowledge as to the characteristics of the administrative data used as potential population indicators in a regression model is important. This report summarizes the strengths and weaknesses associated with the use of residential hydro accounts in the British Columbia regression based population estimation model.

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This paper describes a method of producing current age/sex specific population estimates for small areas utilizing as inputs total population estimates, birth and death data and estimates of historical residual net migration. An evaluation based on the 1981 Census counts for census divisions and school districts in British Columbia is presented.

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A methodology has been developed for producing population estimates by single years of age and sex for small areas (census divisions and census metropolitan areas). To assure reliability, the estimates by single years of age are grouped into five years and only these grouped data are recomended for dissemination. They are based on the age-sex composition of population from the last census, births by sex, deaths by single years of age and sex, estimates of migration by age and sex, and counts of family allowance recipients in the age group 1-14 years.

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Statistics Canada’s current methodologies forestimating the population of census divisions and census metropolitan areas are the regression-nested and component methods. This paper presents the experience with these estimates for the period 1981 to 1985, focusing on problems encountered with the input data on family allowance recipients.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This product presents data on the Sustainable Development Goals. They present an overview of the 17 Goals through infographics by leveraging data currently available to report on Canada’s progress towards the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This course is intended for Government of Canada employees who would like to learn about evaluating the quality of data for a particular use. Whether you are a new employee interested in learning the basics, or an experienced subject matter expert looking to refresh your skills, this course is here to help.

Description: This video explains the key concepts of different levels of aggregation of income data such as household and family income; income concepts derived from key income variables such as adjusted income and equivalence scale; and statistics used for income data such as median and average income, quartiles, quintiles, deciles and percentiles.

Description: This video builds on concepts introduced in the other videos on income. It explains key low-income concepts - Market Basket Measure (MBM), Low income measure (LIM) and Low-income cut-offs (LICO) and the indicators associated with these concepts such as the low-income gap and the low-income ratio. These concepts are used in analysis of the economic well-being of the population.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description:

Gathering, exploring, analyzing and interpreting data are essential steps in producing information that benefits society, the economy and the environment. In this video, we will discuss the importance of considering data ethics throughout the process of producing statistical information.

As a pre-requisite to this video, make sure to watch the video titled “Data Ethics: An introduction” also available in Statistics Canada’s data literacy training catalogue.

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In this video, you will learn the answers to the following questions: What are the different types of error? What are the types of error that lead to statistical bias? Where during the data journey statistical bias can occur?

Description:

Gathering, exploring, analyzing and interpreting data are essential steps in producing information that benefits society, the economy and the environment. To properly conduct these processes, data ethics ethics must be upheld in order to ensure the appropriate use of data.

Description: The Canadian Income Survey (CIS) has introduced improvements to the methods and data sources used to produce income and poverty estimates with the release of its 2022 reference year estimates. Foremost among these improvements is a significant increase in the sample size for a large subset of the CIS content. The weighting methodology was also improved and the target population of the CIS was changed from persons aged 16 years and over to persons aged 15 years and over. This paper describes the changes made and presents the approximate net result of these changes on the income estimates and data quality of the CIS using 2021 data. The changes described in this paper highlight the ways in which data quality has been improved while having little impact on key CIS estimates and trends.

Description: This study applies small area estimation (SAE) and a new geographic concept called Self-contained Labor Area (SLA) to the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (CSBC) with a focus on remote work opportunities in rural labor markets. Through SAE modelling, we estimate the proportions of businesses, classified by general industrial sector (service providers and goods producers), that would primarily offer remote work opportunities to their workforce.

Description: Record linkage aims at identifying record pairs related to the same unit and observed in two different data sets, say A and B. Fellegi and Sunter (1969) suggest each record pair is tested whether generated from the set of matched or unmatched pairs. The decision function consists of the ratio between m(y) and u(y),probabilities of observing a comparison y of a set of k>3 key identifying variables in a record pair under the assumptions that the pair is a match or a non-match, respectively. These parameters are usually estimated by means of the EM algorithm using as data the comparisons on all the pairs of the Cartesian product ?=A×B. These observations (on the comparisons and on the pairs status as match or non-match) are assumed as generated independently of other pairs, assumption characterizing most of the literature on record linkage and implemented in software tools (e.g. RELAIS, Cibella et al. 2012). On the contrary, comparisons y and matching status in ? are deterministically dependent. As a result, estimates on m(y) and u(y) based on the EM algorithm are usually bad. This fact jeopardizes the effective application of the Fellegi-Sunter method, as well as automatic computation of quality measures and possibility to apply efficient methods for model estimation on linked data (e.g. regression functions), as in Chambers et al. (2015). We propose to explore ? by a set of samples, each one drawn so to preserve independence of comparisons among the selected record pairs. Simulations are encouraging.

Description: The authors used the Splink probabilistic linkage package developed by the UK Ministry of Justice, to link census data from England and Wales to itself to find duplicate census responses. A large gold standard of confirmed census duplicates was available meaning that the results of the Splink implementation could be quality assured. This paper describes the implementation and features of Splink, gives details of the settings and parameters that we used to tune Splink for our particular project, and gives the results that we obtained.

Description: Estimation at fine levels of aggregation is necessary to better describe society. Small area estimation model-based approaches that combine sparse survey data with rich data from auxiliary sources have been proven useful to improve the reliability of estimates for small domains. Considered here is a scenario where small area model-based estimates, produced at a given aggregation level, needed to be disaggregated to better describe the social structure at finer levels. For this scenario, an allocation method was developed to implement the disaggregation, overcoming challenges associated with data availability and model development at such fine levels. The method is applied to adult literacy and numeracy estimation at the county-by-group-level, using data from the U.S. Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. In this application the groups are defined in terms of age or education, but the method could be applied to estimation of other equity-deserving groups.

Description: In accordance with Statistics Canada’s long-term Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), several initiatives have been implemented into the Labour Force Survey (LFS). One of the more direct initiatives was a targeted increase in the size of the monthly LFS sample. Furthermore, a regular Supplement program was introduced, where an additional series of questions are asked to a subset of LFS respondents and analyzed in a monthly or quarterly production cycle. Finally, the production of modelled estimates based on Small Area Estimation (SAE) methodologies resumed for the LFS and will include a wider scope with more analytical value than what had existed in the past. This paper will give an overview of these three initiatives.

Description: Sampling variance smoothing is an important topic in small area estimation. In this paper, we propose sampling variance smoothing methods for small area proportion estimation. In particular, we consider the generalized variance function and design effect methods for sampling variance smoothing. We evaluate and compare the smoothed sampling variances and small area estimates based on the smoothed variance estimates through analysis of survey data from Statistics Canada. The results from real data analysis indicate that the proposed sampling variance smoothing methods work very well for small area estimation.

Description: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is committed to improving access to more microdata, while ensuring privacy and confidentiality is maintained, through its virtual DataLab which supports researchers to undertake complex research more efficiently. Currently, the DataLab research outputs need to follow strict rules to minimise disclosure risks for clearance. However, the clerical-review process is not cost effective and has potential to introduce errors. The increasing number of statistical outputs from different projects can potentially introduce differencing risks even though these outputs from different projects have met the strict output rules. The ABS has been exploring the possibility of providing automatic output checking using the ABS cellkey methodology to ensure that all outputs across different projects are protected consistently to minimise differencing risks and reduce costs associated with output checking.

Description: With the availability of larger and more diverse data sources, Statistical Institutes in Europe are inclined to publish statistics on smaller groups than they used to do. Moreover, high impact global events like the Covid crisis and the situation in Ukraine may also ask for statistics on specific subgroups of the population. Publishing on small, targeted groups not only raises questions on statistical quality of the figures, it also raises issues concerning statistical disclosure risk. The principle of statistical disclosure control does not depend on the size of the groups the statistics are based on. However, the risk of disclosure does depend on the group size: the smaller a group, the higher the risk. Traditional ways to deal with statistical disclosure control and small group sizes include suppressing information and coarsening categories. These methods essentially increase the (mean) group sizes. More recent approaches include perturbative methods that have the intention to keep the group sizes small in order to preserve as much information as possible while reducing the disclosure risk sufficiently. In this paper we will mention some European examples of special focus group statistics and discuss the implications on statistical disclosure control. Additionally, we will discuss some issues that the use of perturbative methods brings along: its impact on disclosure risk and utility as well as the challenges in proper communication thereof.

Description: The publication of more disaggregated data can increase transparency and provide important information on underrepresented groups. Developing more readily available access options increases the amount of information available to and produced by researchers. Increasing the breadth and depth of the information released allows for a better representation of the Canadian population, but also puts a greater responsibility on Statistics Canada to do this in a way that preserves confidentiality, and thus it is helpful to develop tools which allow Statistics Canada to quantify the risk from the additional data granularity. In an effort to evaluate the risk of a database reconstruction attack on Statistics Canada’s published Census data, this investigation follows the strategy of the US Census Bureau, who outlined a method to use a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver to reconstruct individual attributes of residents of a hypothetical US Census block, based just on a table of summary statistics. The technique is expanded to attempt to reconstruct a small fraction of Statistics Canada’s Census microdata. This paper will discuss the findings of the investigation, the challenges involved in mounting a reconstruction attack, and the effect of an existing confidentiality measure in mitigating these attacks. Furthermore, the existing strategy is compared to other potential methods used to protect data – in particular, releasing tabular data perturbed by some random mechanism, such as those suggested by differential privacy.

Description: This series provides detailed documentation on income developments, including survey design issues, data quality evaluation and exploratory research.

Description: Since 1984, an annual international symposium on methodological issues has been sponsored by Statistics Canada. Proceedings have been available since 1987.

Description: Papers in this series provide background discussions of the methods used to develop data for economic, health, and social analytical studies at Statistics Canada. They are intended to provide readers with information on the statistical methods, standards and definitions used to develop databases for research purposes. All papers in this series have undergone peer and institutional review to ensure that they conform to Statistics Canada's mandate and adhere to generally accepted standards of good professional practice.

Description: The journal publishes articles dealing with various aspects of statistical development relevant to a statistical agency, such as design issues in the context of practical constraints, use of different data sources and collection techniques, total survey error, survey evaluation, research in survey methodology, time series analysis, seasonal adjustment, demographic studies, data integration, estimation and data analysis methods, and general survey systems development. The emphasis is placed on the development and evaluation of specific methodologies as applied to data collection or the data themselves.

Description: This report summarizes the annual achievements of the Methodology Research and Development Program (MRDP) sponsored by the Modern Statistical Methods and Data Science Branch at Statistics Canada. This program covers research and development activities in statistical methods with potentially broad application in the agency’s statistical programs; these activities would otherwise be less likely to be carried out during the provision of regular methodology services to those programs. The MRDP also includes activities that provide support in the application of past successful developments in order to promote the use of the results of research and development work. Selected prospective research activities are also presented.

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The Geography working paper series is intended to stimulate discussion on a variety of topics covering conceptual, methodological or technical work to support the development and dissemination of the division's data, products and services. Readers of the series are encouraged to contact the Geography Division with comments and suggestions.

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Historical works allow readers to peer into the past, not only to satisfy our curiosity about “the way things were,” but also to see how far we’ve come, and to learn from the past. For Statistics Canada, such works are also opportunities to commemorate the agency’s contributions to Canada and its people, and serve as a reminder that an institution such as this continues to evolve each and every day.

On the occasion of Statistics Canada’s 100th anniversary in 2018, Standing on the shoulders of giants: History of Statistics Canada: 1970 to 2008, builds on the work of two significant publications on the history of the agency, picking up the story in 1970 and carrying it through the next 36 years, until 2008. To that end, when enough time has passed to allow for sufficient objectivity, it will again be time to document the agency’s next chapter as it continues to tell Canada’s story in numbers.

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The Record Linkage Project Process Model (RLPPM) was developed by Statistics Canada to identify the processes and activities involved in record linkage. The RLPPM applies to linkage projects conducted at the individual and enterprise level using diverse data sources to create new data sources to meet analytical and operational needs.

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This document briefly describes Demosim, the microsimulation population projection model, how it works as well as its methods and data sources. It is a methodological complement to the analytical products produced using Demosim.

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This publication is a catalogue of strategies and mechanisms that a statistical organization should consider adopting, according to its particular context. This compendium is based on lessons learned and best practices of leadership and management of statistical agencies within the scope of Statistics Canada’s International Statistical Fellowship Program (ISFP). It contains four broad sections including, characteristics of an effective national statistical system; core management practices; improving, modernizing and finding efficiencies; and, strategies to better inform and engage key stakeholders.