The timely, accurate monitoring of social indicators, such as poverty or inequality, on a
finegrained spatial and temporal scale is a crucial tool for understanding social phenomena
and policymaking, but poses a great challenge to official statistics. This article argues that an
interdisciplinary approach, combining the body of statistical research in small area
estimation with the body of research in social data mining based on Big Data, can provide
novel means to tackle this problem successfully. Big Data derived from the digital crumbs …

The timely, accurate monitoring of social indicators, such as poverty or inequality, at a fine
grained spatial and temporal scale is a challenging task for official statistics, albeit a crucial
tool for understanding social phenomena and policy making. We advocate in this paper that
an interdisciplinary approach, combining the body of statistical research in small area
estimates with the body of research in social data mining based on big data, can provide
novel means to tackle this problem successfully. Big data sensed from the digital …