Research indices using web scraped price data: May 2016 update

Summary

Web scraping is a tool for extracting information from the underlying HTML code of websites. ONS has been conducting research into these technologies and, since May 2014, has been scraping prices from the websites of three retailers. Last year, ONS released two updates that constructed experimental price indices from the data. In this release, we provide updates to the experimental indices, and an analysis of the different methods used to clean and classify the data.

Publications

Research indices using web scraped price data: May 2016 update

Web scraping is a tool for extracting information from the underlying HTML code of websites. ONS has been conducting research into these technologies and, since May 2014, has been scraping prices from the websites of three retailers. Last year, ONS released two updates that constructed experimental price indices from the data. In this release, we provide updates to the experimental indices, and an analysis of the different methods used to clean and classify the data.

Data

Research indices using web scraped price data - Appendix tables

This workbook presents experimental price indices that are constructed from ONS web scraped data from three grocery retailers since May 2014. These are early analysis using experimental techniques to help us develop our statistical methodology and are not comparable with headline estimates of inflation. We would strongly caution against their use in economic modelling and analysis.