Fourth CIS International Statistical Forum opens in Yerevan

The fourth CIS International Statistical Forum, a two-day event entitled “New Methods and Technologies in Statistics”, has opened in Yerevan.

The forum has brought together heads and leading specialists from national statistical agencies in CIS member states and other countries, representatives of international organisations, including the UN system, the World Bank, the Eurasian Economic Commission and the CIS Interstate Statistical Committee, as well as members of the expert community.

During the discussions, participants focused on the use of administrative and basic data, the development of modern methods of statistical analysis and the prospects for using artificial intelligence in official statistics.

In his address, CIS Deputy Secretary General Denis Trefilov said that, over the Commonwealth’s 35 years of existence, cooperation in statistics had become one of the most stable and professional areas of interaction between CIS states.

“The environment in which official statistics operate is currently changing. Traditional statistical surveys are increasingly being supplemented by administrative data, new sources of information, geospatial technologies, automated processing and artificial intelligence tools,” Trefilov said.

He added that technological progress not only opened up new opportunities for the statistical community but also imposed new requirements.

“The more data and algorithms surround us, the greater the demand for verified, methodologically sound and comparable information. In this context, the importance of official statistics is not diminishing. On the contrary, it is growing,” the CIS Deputy Secretary General said.

He stressed that the statistical community faced a dual task: actively using modern technologies in the production of statistical data while ensuring that official data remained a reliable information base for government decisions and new digital systems.

The forum paid particular attention to the need to exchange national experiences and jointly seek practical solutions amid rapid technological development in statistics.