Page 363 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 2

STS500 Fauzana I. et al.
and will continue experiencing. It is an on-going process and in tandem with
the data revolution that happens in the world nowadays.

Keywords
Big Data; Price Intelligence; Analytics; Consumer Price Index; Challenges

1. Introduction
Among the many importance of Big Data are reducing cost, outdo
competition, better decision-making and improving products and services.
The earliest record of using data to track and control businesses dated back
from 7,000 years ago when accounting was introduced in Mesopotamia in
order to record the growth of crops and herds. In the past few years, there has
been a massive increase in Big Data startups, where all trying to deal with Big
Data and helping organisations to understand Big Data. Inasmuch, more and
more companies are slowly adopting and moving towards Big Data. One of
the StatsBDA modules that is being developed in DOSM Big Data is Price
Intelligence (PI). The modernisation of data collection mainly consists of the
adoption of web scraping techniques to scrape price data from related website
for CPI compilation and improving the quality of data. Another need of this
Price Intelligence module is because of the growth in e-commerce nowadays.
The StatsBDA in Malaysia began in August 2016 where the advertisement of
the tender started until it is awarded to one of the industry players in
November 2016. From that date onwards, the project will be expected to be
accomplished by May 2018.
STATBDA’s main goal is to make sure that no one gets left behind. Price
Intelligence or PI is responsible to care for the interest of the other side of the
spectrum that is the consumers. The main goal of PI is to create a price list of
different goods and provide the solution for consumers on the best prices
available. Via web scraping, PI extracts the product prices from the internet
through a method called web crawling. The prices will then be formed into a
structured data and they will be classified into different categories. The
consumer can then see for themselves a list of prices from hundreds of sellers
and sort out the best prices for them through what we call Price Basket
Enrichment where online prices will be integrated with current CPI and the
prices are made public. Price basket enrichment will not consists of all CPI
basket though. It will consist only certain items which is available and suitable
to use.
At the same time, the DOSM Transformation Plan 2015-2020 states that
the main priority in strengthening the role of the department is to benefit the
data evolution through big data. Strategic Core 1 is the creation of product
and statistical service integrity and reliable while Strategy 3 is to enhance the
utilisation of secondary data sources. Meanwhile Program 2 is the initiative in

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