Starting with the June 2024 provisional international migration estimates (to be published on 13 August 2024), Stats NZ will adopt a new training window which includes the 32 most recent finalised months, plus finalised border crossings from the four oldest provisional months. This change in the training window produces smaller standard errors and revisions for provisional estimates. Final migration estimates are unaffected by this change, because in those estimates the migrant status of all travellers is certain and no modelling is required.

This page explains how we determined the new training window for the international migration model. The training window is the rolling period of historical border crossing data used to train the model for provisional migration estimates. Our goal is to reduce the size of the initial revisions and standard errors by adjusting this window.

Since the international migration model has been operating – starting with the November 2018 provisional migration estimates (published in January 2019) – the training window has been the 36 most recent finalised months.

Visit our website to read this methods paper:

• Adjusting the training window for the international migration model

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