Official statistics

Smu has established a strong working relationship with members of staff at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG). The School of Mathematics and the ONS have recently been awarded Cardiff University’s Innovation Prize due to its strategic partnership with Cardiff University which helped smooth the significant expansion of ONS into South Wales and is developing the highly-skilled graduates necessary for a major government department.

The ONS teamed up with Cardiff School of Mathematics to work on a number of projects including the creation of a new MSc in Operational Research and Applied Statistics. Designed with significant input from ONS to ensure that it met their needs, this vocationally-oriented course offers joint sessions as well as lectures which are delivered by ONS staff.

Members of Smu also lead on a number of professional development courses (on the statistical programming software SAS) delivered to ONS and WAG staff.

Current on-going research projects include:
1. Investigating the use of singular spectrum analysis by the time series branch of ONS.
2. A comparison of singular spectrum analysis and state-space modelling.
3. Statistical analysis of panel data obtained in the process of survey sampling.

Cardiff Investigators