Pacific projects and participation at an open-source statistics software ‘hackathon’ and conference at Melbourne’s Monash University last month showcased the power of the region’s open data, with SPC sponsoring members’ attendance for capability development.
The Pacific Community (SPC) sponsored six participants—and contributed four Pacific project ideas to ‘hack’—at last week’s OceaniaR Hackathon 2024 for the R statistical programming language community, followed by participation in the WOMBAT ‘Open the World with Open Source’ conference at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
The OceaniaR ‘hackathon’—an event where attendees collaborate intensively over a short timeframe on software projects or problem-solving—brought together some of the leading developers in the R programming-language community from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific to work together on R-focused projects for social good.
R is free, open-source software for statistical computing, data analysis and visualisation that allows users to perform complex analyses and manipulate data efficiently—with no licensing costs, a vast ecosystem of add-ons and an engaged community of contributors.
The OceaniaR event was followed by a conference organised by Monash University’s Business Analytics Team (‘WOMBAT’), ‘Open the World with Open Source’—convening analysts from academia, industry and government to learn and discuss new open-source software tools for business analytics and data science.
Following the hackathon and conference, participants also had the opportunity to tour Monash, and meet with researchers and professors in statistics, economics and data science.
R-volution in Pacific open data
SPC put forward four potential hacks for OceaniaR, all involving the building of new R tools to work with SDMX—Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange—from the Pacific Data Hub, a single, comprehensive gateway to open data about the Pacific, financed by New Zealand’s Government.
Ms Susie Mento and Mr Herman Tevilili from Vanuatu Bureau of Statistics (VBoS) were sponsored by SPC to attend in support of their skills development in R, choosing to join a team working on an image-outlier identification project using machine-learning techniques for frog-species monitoring.
“The week was incredibly enriching,” said Mr Tevilili. “I learnt the value of collaborative problem-solving from the hackathon and gained practical skills from the ‘Interactive Web Applications with Shiny for R’ training, which will help improve my ongoing R Shiny app projects".
“The ‘Applied Forecasting’ training I attended provided me with valuable insights into predictive analytics that I plan to experiment with our trade merchandise and visitors’ arrival datasets.”
For Ms Mento, the hackathon’s use of machine-learning techniques was a chance to apply learning to a VBoS natural disaster and climate-change project also using machine learning in R.
“As an Excel user, my key takeaway was being able to comfortably use and explore open-source software such as R for multiple data exploratory analysis,” she said.
Three from SPC’s Statistics for Development Division—who play a statistics system coordination and capacity development role in the Pacific—attended, including R power user Dr Giulio Dalla Riva, Statistics Adviser in Data Systems. Dr Dalla Riva led a group in developing tools for a tidy SDMX, a streamlined, unified way of working with highly complex data tables.
From SPC, Mr Toga Raikoti and Mr Olivier Menaouer were part of a team creating a dashboard on gender inequality, using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics—and inspired in part by the Pacific Data Hub’s Gender Dashboard.
Open source down under
Dr Dalla Riva was also a keynote speaker at the follow-on WOMBAT conference, on the topic ‘Opening Pacific data: Opportunities and challenges for domain experts and data scientists.’
“My presentation was meant as a call to action,” he said. “I invited everyone to use the data in the Pacific Data Hub, contribute their data to the Pacific Data Hub, work with us in developing open-access tools… even consider working at SPC!
“The feedback I received after [my talk] is that people are very impressed with the quality of the data that the Pacific is sharing with the world.”
- Visit the Pacific Data Hub
- Learn about SPC’s Statistics for Development Division’s capacity development work.
Contact: Ben Campion, Communications Adviser, Statistics for Development, Pacific Community (SPC) | [email protected]
