The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) may soon use the research results of a QUT Centre for Data Science PhD Candidate when sharing data with the Australian public, researchers, and government agencies.
The ABS recently hired Filip (Phil) Juricev-Martincev to join the team responsible for updating the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS), the geographic boundaries that enable the release of data at local and neighbourhood levels.
As a key piece of national infrastructure, the ASGS is updated every five years to account for changes in Australia’s population and how it’s distributed across the country. The ASGS divides Australia into regions of different sizes, which need to fit together consistently. Larger regions are created by grouping smaller regions in a logical way.
Additionally, the statistics for these regions must also combine accurately when you move from smaller regions to larger ones. This need for consistency and accuracy makes updating the ASGS a complex and time-consuming task, like solving a challenging puzzle.
Phil’s research offers the ABS a solution for automating the creation of new geographic boundaries, which has the potential to reduce some of the manual work needed to update the ASGS, particularly in high-growth areas.
“Until now, the rezoning of high-growth areas has been done manually. I have created an algorithm that automates aspects of this manual rezoning,” says Phil.
As he completes his PhD with QUT’s Centre for Data Science, Phil has already begun working as a designer for the next edition of the ASGS in the Statistical Infrastructure Division at the ABS office in Brisbane.
Phil’s supervisor in the Centre for Data Science is Associate Professor Gentry White.
“We very much value our relationship with the ABS and the Methodology and Data Science Division, which has enabled the collaboration. It’s exciting to see something that started as a PhD project advance to the point where it could make a real difference in future editions of the ASGS,” says Gentry.
“Plus, it’s not too often that a person takes their PhD project into the real world right away, but that’s what Phil is doing.”