INFORM : scientific and technical improvements in 2017 : missing values imputation and IT developments

The European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) is the technical and scientific leader of the Index for Risk Management (INFORM), being the responsible for the development of its methodological improvements and their corresponding implementation. This publication describes the major methodological and technical improvements on the INFORM model implemented by the JRC in 2017. Although the indicators have been selected on the basis of their reliability, consistency, continuity and completeness, most of them do not cover all the countries with data for every year. This results in a significant number of missing values, irregularly distributed among countries, time and indicators. This report describes an innovative approach for predicting missing values using the most advanced statistical technics, the so called machine learning, that has been combined with the traditional composite indicator adopted by INFORM in order to improve the accuracy of the risk index. We also present the IT latest developments that support the INFORM model, including the web platform for managing the INFORM Subnational models and improvements in the new Application Programming Interface (API).