ESCAP sesions on RAP

Published

September 11, 2024

Reproducible Analytic Pipelines (or RAP) is taught by UN ESCAP in two sessions. This page provides an overview of what is covered

Overall scope of the training

RAP is a large topic and it has its own Udemy course, supporting sites (such as the RAP companion), as well as communities of practice. ESCAP can’t thus hope to cover it in full, but instead aims to provide a detailed enough overview so that member countries being trained on web scraping for the CPI can benefit from maturity principles that RAP represents and be able to build enough capacity to continue on their own.

Overall objective

The overall objective of the RAP training is to provide an overview of key RAP principles, cover the value it brings to official statistics, as well as train class participants so that they can proceed on their own and help bring RAP into their own work. Class participants (who ESCAP trains) can thus become trainers in their own National Statistical Organizations (NSOs) - helping their teams and groups continue to learn more about RAP, explore each of the principles and best practices, and learn how to implement it into their research or official statistics (i.e. production). In a more formal sense, this RAP class thus aims to increase the capacity of participating NSOs to learn RAP and apply it for their continued modernization, and especially the implementation of alternative (such as web scrape) data for consumer price statistics. Two sessions provide fist an overview and second a deeper dive on RAP

Session 1, virtual: Overview of RAP

Date: September 11, 2024

Objective: Introduce ideas inherent in RAP and have participants walk away with an understanding why technical maturity skills are important and how RAP can help them mature their organization

Topics:

  • Why RAP is important to learn
  • What is RAP in more detail and what problem is it aiming to solve
  • Outline of key RAP principles and how they would help
  • Wrap up and discussion on maturity levels to demonstrate how to develop RAP friendly approaches gradually

Content: See the session page for more details.

Session 2, in person: Deeper dive into RAP components

Date: September 18, 2024

Objective: Building on the initial training on RAP, go deeper into the components to really cover the principles in moderate detail. To help anchor the components, use cases and examples are prepared to explain each aspect, and some hands-on exercises will help learners get a better appreciation of the tasks.

Topics:

  • Quick overview to recap the previous session and contextualization of how web scraping fits into the overall process of web scraped data for the CPI
  • Deeper coverage of the principles:
    • Automation
    • Modularity, re-usability, etc
    • Transparency
    • Open source tools
    • Version control
    • Good coding practices
    • Testing
    • Peer review
  • Coverage of levels of RAP to allow gradual adoption

Exercise in detail: To help learners practice several of the technical skills in RAP, participants are given time in person (helped by the in-person mentors ) try the exercises.

Content: See the session page for more details.

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