AnalevR: An Interactive R-Based Analysis Platform as a Service for Utilizing Official Statistics Data in Indonesia
The process of making decisions, drawing conclusions, and estimating outcomes require fast and easy access to up-to-date and reliable information. As Indonesia’s national statistical agency, BPS-Statistics Indonesia produces a massive amount of wide-range strategic data every year. The use of these official statistics data has expanded to non-government groups such as researchers, students, and businesses. However, these data are still underutilized by the public due to technical limitations (lack of skilled and experienced employees) and raw data exclusivity and locality (distributed and separately-stored microdata). Other issues such as bureaucratic procedure, long waiting time, and the prices to buy the data have also contributed to worsening the situation.
In line with Indonesia’s National Bureaucratic Reform Program, BPS-Statistics Indonesia aims to create innovations in public services by modernizing the way people benefit from the data. We introduce AnalevR, an online R-based analysis platform for accessing, analyzing, and visualizing official statistics data for free without having to own the original microdata. Data and analysis modules are put in a cloud storage and can be explored via the menu provided. The analysis is performed inside the workspace, either using Graphical User Interface (GUI) mode (menu and dialog) or non-GUI mode (syntax editor). AnalevR executes the R-based codes remotely and displays the result in the output container. We use R as the underlying engine because it has a complete collection of libraries for analysis and visualization compared to other languages. All user-defined variables and functions are automatically saved in the workspace for future use.
AnalevR comes with many benefits: 1) All-in-one concept - support acquiring, wrangling, analyzing, and visualizing data, 2) Increasing efficiency by reducing the time lag between data request and analysis, 3) Flexibility - free access, easy to operate, multiple workspace, support both R users and non-R users, 4) Sustainability - support user collaboration. AnalevR is built upon a variety of technologies: R for Server, ReactJS and PHP for Client, and Redis and Webdis for Message Broker. These technologies give AnalevR the ability to provide better service and performance compared to similar tools that only use single technology. AnalevR is currently at an experimental stage and the prototype is up and running on http://simpeg.bps.go.id/analev-r This project is open source with code available on https://github.com/erikaris/analev-r.
We believe that AnalevR will also be of interest to other countries that suffer from the same data underutilization problems regarding the bureaucracy and regulation issue to obtain the data. For future work, we plan to make it compatible with other languages such as Python and Java. This innovation will raise user involvement in employing BPS’ data, promote the use of R, and ultimately increase statistical quality in Indonesia.
Reference:
POST03-019
Session:
New Methods & Techniques
Presenter/s:
Erika Siregar
Presentation type:
Poster presentation
Room:
Lunches Space
Date:
Thursday, 14 March
Time:
12:30 - 13:30
Session times:
12:30 - 13:30