The main objective of the project is to develop methods and tools that can be used to optimize the results obtained with a limited amount of human resources in the task of detecting errors on foreign trade transaction forms. This is a current problem at the Portuguese Statistics Institute (INE), and optimizing these results is of key importance given the political and economical impacts of the statistical indicators produced with the information contained on these forms.

The project aims at :

• developing methods and tools that provide rankings of outlierness for a set of transactions, which can be used to decide upon the transactions to be inspected,
• developing methods which rank transactions according to a combination of outlierness and criteria that estimate the effect of the errors on foreign trade statistics,
• comparing the methods to existing alternatives for this type of tasks, including the strategy currently used at INE,
• test the methods on other related problems.