Affiliations: [a] School of Statistics, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines | [b] Philippine Statistical Research and Training Institute, Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Manuel Leonard F. Albis, School of Statistics Bldg., Quirino Cor. TM Kalaw St., UP Diliman Campus, Quezon City, Metro Manila 1101, Philippines. Tel.: +632 89818500 loc 3503, Philippines. E-mail: mfalbis@up.edu.ph.
Abstract: Official price statistics in the Philippines are mainly sourced from the conduct of regular surveys and censuses which entail high costs. As businesses move into digital platforms, alternatives to these traditional data sources have become more available; one of which is web scraping, a process of collecting information from the web. As digital and online platforms become increasingly utilized for commerce, web scraping offers a way to increase the frequency of data collection while reducing its cost compared to price surveys. This paper provides a survey of experiences of various government statistical agencies in their conduct of web scraping for the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Moreover, it details the Philippines’ experience using web scraped data to estimate the food and alcoholic beverages CPI of the National Capital Region in the Philippines, and that is compared to the official CPI estimate of the Philippine Statistics Authority. Finally, this paper discusses the challenges encountered and the recommendations for enhancing the approach.
Keywords: Web scraping, online prices, CPI, PCOICOP
