Frank P. Pijpers (Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and University of Amsterdam)
The Dutch national statistical agency (CBS) is now spending some considerable effort on mapping out the network of connections between people, and connections between enterprises. In my talk I will discuss why such relationships are so important for national statistics and give some highlights of what type of societal questions they may help answer and hence what societal need CBS fills by making publications on the basis of networks of connections and by facilitating access for scientists to the relevant microdata.
While CBS has an enormous wealth of data at its disposal, from registers and surveys as well as new data sources, there are also aspects of the relationships between people, and between enterprises, that are not at all well covered. Another important topic is therefore to apply inference techniques to recover at least some statistical properties of those aspects or layers of the complex networks of connections where the data on their own are insufficient. I will discuss some recent work in this area and an outlook for the near future.