Calculating economic indexes per household and censal section from official Spanish databases

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Frutos, Sonia | Menasalvas, Ernestina | Montes, Cesar | Segovia, Javier

Affiliations: Facultad de Informática, Campus de Montegancedo, UPM. 28660 Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

Abstract: In the competitive environments, in which all sorts of organisations move it is of utmost importance to have information about clients. Public databases offer information about households and families. However, the non-crossed and non-georeferenced format of these databases often makes it difficult to extract typologies and information. There are only two public databases from which to get information at the household or family level in Spain: Population and Housing Censuses, which provide aggregated and georeferenced information, and the Family Expenditure Surveys, which provide information on household consumption, both published by the National Statistics Institute. The two databases cannot be directly cross-referenced, because the Family Expenditure Surveys offer a detailed description of the families, whereas the Census provides the same data but aggregated without cross-references. In this paper, we define a procedure for cross-referencing these DBs and calculating the economic household indexes for Spanish censal sections that define the average quarterly economic behaviour of the households located in each censal section. The necessary analysis procedure is based on neural networks and provides an estimate of the trend in these indexes over a series of years. The procedure can be easily extrapolated to similar problems with official data sources from other countries.

DOI: 10.3233/IDA-2003-7607

Journal: Intelligent Data Analysis, vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 603-613, 2003