Cultural & Creative Sectors and Industries Observatory"

Many people ask if we can really add value to free data that can be downloaded from the Internet by anybody. We do not only work with easy-to-download data, but we know that free, public data usually requires a lot of work to become really valuable. To start with, it is not always easy to find.

Public data sources are often plagued with missng values. Naively you may think that you can ignore them, but think twice: in most cases, missing data in a table is not missing information, but rather malformatted information which will destroy your beautiful visualization or stop your application from working. In this example we show how we increase the usable subset of a public dataset by 66.7%, rendering useful what would otherwise have been a deal-breaker in panel regressions or machine learning applications.

Reprex joined the REshaping CCSI REsearch: Open data, policy analysis and methods for evidence-based decision-making consortium consortium, which will mainly develop new policy evidence in the field of innovation and inclusiveness for the creative and cultural sectors, industries.