Neil Seeman is a senior fellow at the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto, where he is senior academic adviser to the Investigative Journalism Bureau and a senior fellow at Massey College. He is chairman of RIWI.
Alternative data, or high-frequency data, is rising as a powerful decision-making tool in finance and public health across the globe. Japan, for instance, has been a world leader in nowcasting: Nikkei's CPINow data, assembled from scanner or point-of-sale data, has been used to predict and accurately forecast inflation.