R in Swiss Official Statistics: Spring Meetup

Welcome to adminR! 👋

We are pleased to invite you to our tenth edition of the semi-annual R meetup, adminR – R in Official Statistics. We are grateful to the Federal Office of Public Health for hosting this event in Bern Liebefeld.

As usual, there will be 🍻, 🍿 and great discussions after the following presentations:

Differential privacy for epidemiological data
Liliane Trafelet, BAG, Federal Office of Public Health

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for open epidemiological data as a basis for political decision-making and the societal discourse on public health matters. At the same time, the risk of de-anonymisation and possible data breaches increases with the availability of data and computing power, which makes it more difficult to protect privacy. Differential privacy offers a means to measure and manage this risk by adding controlled noise to the data. We provide a glimpse into our experiences in defining privacy budgets and the implementation of differential privacy in R.

Producing reproducible figures for reliable communication: the SNSF workflow
Simon Gorin, Swiss National Science Foundation

Data visualization is an important aspect of efficient communication. At the SNSF, the Communication department relies on a set of reference figures for communicating with the government and the general public. Delivering reproducible visualizations for consistent and reliable communication is essential. In this presentation, I will introduce the R tools and packages developed internally, and that are used to make such reference figures: from interacting with internal database, making snapshots of database for reproducibility, and generating figures according to our corporate design, to deploying the figures internally.

From St. Gallen into the R-Universe — towards a national collaboration platform for official statistics
Dr. Jan Wunder, Félix Luginbühl, Statistical Office of Canton St. Gallen

In this talk, we will present the new R infrastructure at the Statistical Office of Canton St. Gallen, the current stage of the ongoing R transformation and our vision for the future of official statistics.
We will focus on the new R working group within CORSTAT, the conference of the of regional statistical offices in Switzerland — and its role within adminR. The R working group was initiated by the Statistical Offices of Canton St. Gallen and Canton Zürich to further foster collaboration among the 17 participating cantons and cites to better coordinate their nationwide R-transformation. We present the new collaboration platform swissstatsr.org and its corresponding R-Universe infrastructure for package monitoring and development. Finally, we highlight several ways to join our initiative and to contribute to the open code development for the greater good.