Symbolic Data Analysis and the SODAS Software in Official Statistics

The need to extract new knowledge from complex data contained in relational databases is increasing. Therefore, it becomes a task of first importance to summarise huge data sets by their underlying concepts in order to extract useful knowledge. These concepts can only be described by more complex data type called “symbolic data”. We define “Symbolic Data Analysis” (SDA) as the extension of standard Data Analysis to symbolic data tables. The “Symbolic Data Analysis” theory is now enhanced by a new software tool called “SODAS” which results from the effort of 17 European teams (sponsored by EUROSTAT). This is shown by several applications in Official Statistics.