Assist. Prof. Milica Maričić, PhD
Department of Operational Research and Statistics
Faculty of Organizational Sciences
University of Belgrade
Belgrade, Serbia
e-mail: milica.maricic@fon.bg.ac.rs
webpage: https://en.fon.bg.ac.rs/nastavnici/milica-maricic/
Title of the invited lecture: The Art and Science of Composite Indicators: Where OR Meets Statistics
Authors: Milica Maričić
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2004), composite indicators (CIs) are metrics formed “when individual indicators are compiled into a single index, on the basis of an underlying model of the multi-dimensional concept that is being measured”. At the very outset, this definition provokes a number of questions, such as the selection of individual indicators as well as the choice of normalisation, aggregation and weighting method. These questions, coupled with the public and policymakers’ desire for rankings, have led to a need for stable and methodologically sound composite indicators (Maričić et al., 2019). As a solution, methods of OR and multivariate statistics have been applied with the goal of creating robust, data-driven CIs.
The talk will address several aspects of CI creation and validation through the lens of OR and multivariate statistics. First, we will detangle the OECD methodological framework for CI creation and focus on the steps in which methods of OR and multivariate statistics can be applied. Second, we will overview the methodologies and frameworks of some of the methods used, paying special attention to those used in the step of assigning weights to individual indicators. Finally, we will explore real-world applications of these methods, demonstrating how OR and statistical methods have been used to create influential composite indicators in various fields. The talk will conclude with the challenges and limitations of current approaches, pointing towards future research directions in developing composite indicators through the application of OR and statistics.
Short CV:
Milica Maričić, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Department of Operational Research and Statistics. She holds a PhD in computational statistics. Her fields of research are composite indicators, rankings, structural equation modelling, and applied statistics. For her research on composite indicators, in 2018, she was awarded the Young Scholars for Better Statistics Award from OECD and IAOS. She published more than 18 Web of Science indexed papers and is cited more than 400 times in the Google Scholar database. Besides actively publishing, she acted as a reviewer for multiple WoS-indexed journals. She is engaged in national (PANACEA, POPENVIROS) and international scientific (COIL project) projects as well as international teaching mobility programmes (Radboud University, the Netherlands; University of Giessen, Germany; Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany, University of Oslo, Norway). She is an elected member of the ISI (International Statistical Institute), a member of the IAOS and IACS and a member of ISI special interest groups related to sports statistics and women in statistics.