Will Becker

COINr is an open-source R package for building and analysing composite indicators, developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.

So far in my few posts in this blog I’ve been writing about indicators. Actually I only started working in indicators around 2015.

Happy to announce the formal start of a new project. COINr! ….and what is that, you may ask. Well, let me begin with a bit of background. Building composite indicators requires quite a number of steps, including denomination, imputation, normalisation, weighting, aggregation, multivariate analysis, sensitivity analysis, visualisation and others besides.

Here’s something that crops up all the time in indicators, but is discussed less than you might think.

Why use composite indicators? After all, as critics are eager to point out, they are full of subjective decisions and uncertainties, you’re basically adding apples and oranges together, and no one is really sure what the result actually means.

Everyone knows what a bad hair day is. Well, the idea that some days things just don’t work out can be applied to pretty much everything.

On 22-25 September the first international conference on Asia-Europe Sustainable Connectivity (AESCON) took place online with around 200 participants in total. The last page in that story (or chapter, perhaps), is the Key Takeaways Report, which is a summary of messages and themes that came out of the conference and is available here.

So, having explained myself for why I wanted to build a website, I will also explain why I am writing a blog. The main reason is that, having accumulated quite some experience in various things, particularly indicators and statistics, I often find myself answering questions in emails on recurring topics.

In the beginning I created a website. And I saw that it was OK (but needed a lot of improvement, let’s be honest.) I have finally been able to launch a website for Bluefox.