Statisticians working for the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) recommend a switch to ReGenesees for the calibration of survey estimates. ReGenesees is developed as open source by Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. The survey analysis tool is built on top of R, the open source statistical computing programming environment.
Organisations across the UK Government Statistical Service should explore using ReGenesees in a production setting, the ONS statisticians conclude in a paper published in the Romanian Statistical Review 3/2015. The researchers recommend IT teams to start compatibility and end-to-end tests.
ReGenesees provides an alternative for GES, proprietary software developed by Statistics Canada. GES in turn depends on other, well-known and widely-used proprietary statistical software.
Supple and speedy
Italy’s National Institute of Statistics (Istat) has been investing in R-based applications since 2006, explains Diego Zardetto, one of the specialists working on ReGenesees. A major motive is to reduce the dependence on proprietary technology, and another is to cut costs, he says. “R also proved to be more powerful, more flexible and quicker to adapt to novel statistical methods developed in the research community.” At Istat, the most-used statistical production software has been successfully migrated to R, says Zardetto.
Istat notices there is a lot of interest in ReGenesees from other statisticians. So far, 33 statistical institutes from across the globe have registered their downloading of the software. Similarly, Istat is aware of downloads by 28 universities and research centres. “Every now and then we exchange emails with colleagues of other institutes who ask me questions about specific features of ReGenesees.”
Zardetto points out that ReGenesees was recently used for three important surveys by the Scottish Government: the Scottish Household Survey, the Scottish Health Survey, and the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey.
Standard licence
Istat’s survey analysis tool is published under the European Union’s free software licence, the EUPL. “That is nowadays the standard license for releasing free and open source software developed by Istat”, Zardetto says.
ReGenesees is one of OSOR’s Solutions of the month for December 2015.
More information:
Solutions of the month
ReGenesees System
A Comparative Study of Complex Survey Estimation Software in ONS (PDF)
20th GSS Methodology Symposium
A Comparative Study of Complex Estimation Software (PDF)
ReGenesees: an Advanced R System for Calibration, Estimation and Sampling Error Assessment in Complex Sample Surveys