News

A data science approach to estimate the use of natural spaces: a feasibility study

We demonstrate the use of a range of freely available anonymised and aggregated novel datasets to estimate visitation counts to natural areas.

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Comparing international transport performance in urban centres: upcoming work

We are planning to follow up on previous work we published earlier this year looking at public transport availability across the UK, by providing metrics for urban centres across the UK, as well as their international counterparts.

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Helping decision makers understand the economy quickly through new methods

Nowcasting refers to generating estimates of the current (“now”) state of the economy.  We investigate how signature methods can be useful in the context of economic nowcasting

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Using new shipping data to improve government understanding of trade flows

We show how shipping instructions can be used to map the trade routes of critical goods. This will help understand our reliance on global ports for accessing specific products, and draw insights on the impact of important events such as strikes.

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Identifying different roles in the social care sector using online job advertisements 

In this guest blog, data science apprentice Evie Brown from the Social Care Analysis team at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) presents work on grouping online job adverts by social care role. This project was a significant part of the final year of the Level Six Data Science Apprenticeship. 

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Case study: responding to the coronavirus pandemic using aggregated BT mobility data

To support the national fight against coronavirus (COVID-19) in March 2020, BT made aggregate, anonymised mobility data available to the UK Government. We quickly turned this into daily updates, with only one day’s delay between activity and the reporting of it.

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Use of hybrid data to understand the community-level influences on coronavirus (COVID-19) incidence

Understanding and monitoring the major influences on COVID-19 infection numbers in communities is essential to inform policy making and evaluate the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions. We have developed a community-level analysis by assembling a large set of static and dynamic data for England.

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Worker shortages: A window on labour demand during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic

The UK’s exit from the European Union created uncertainty about workers across a range of sectors, exacerbated by concerns over workers leaving the country and the impact on labour supply. The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic created additional and sudden changes, with sectors being affected heterogeneously and demand switching from services to goods.

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The Data Science Campus – five years of data science for public good

On 27 March 2017, with an audience of UK and international data science leaders from across the public, private and academic sectors, a team of 8, some brilliant presentations, and a lot of excitement, the Data Science Campus was launched. 5 years later, Louisa Nolan shares what have we learned along the way.

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How effective mentoring relationships are growing data science skills and capacity

The relationship between the mentor and mentee is vital to successful outcomes on the Data Science Accelerator programme. Daniel O’Callaghan (Forestry Commission) and Sam Taylor (DWP) talk about their relationship that helped to deliver a successful project.

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Graduate Induction Week

In 2021, our highly successful Data Science Graduate Programme has been expanded across the UK pubic sector. We have offered 50 places on the programme, located in 10 public sector organisations. 25 places were offered to new graduates, selected from 511 applications. An additional 25 places have also been offered to 25 analysts already in posts, who want to significantly increase their data science skills.

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Taking Reproducible Analytical Pipelines on a virtual tour: first stop the Caribbean

We worked with Statistics Canada to help build data science skills in the Caribbean community, delivering virtual Reproducible Analytical Pipelines training to 12 nations over 5 time zones.

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Using satellite imagery to report changes to water bodies for SDG 6.6.1

In this blog, we describe how we have assessed the quality of the novel Global Surface Water Explorer (GSWE) dataset to better understand its value and fitness-for-purpose, producing data to report the UK’s position on indicator 6.6.1.

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