Abstract
Fifty years ago at a large scientific conference a statistician and a probabilist happen to set down together for lunch. In the ensuing small talk the probabilist admitted to knowing nothing about statistics and ask for a brief introduction to the subject. His companion outlined the common scenario of a company receiving a shipment of 1,000 widgets and selecting 20 of them at random to be tested. He then explained how the number of defective widgets in the sample could be used to make inferences about the state of the remaining 980 widgets in the shipment. The probabilist thought about this for a minute and then remarked, “I do not understand how knowledge about the 20 sampled units can tell me anything about the remaining 980 unsampled units.” It is easy to forget how nonintuitive it is to claim that learning the observed values of the units in a sample, selected by random sampling, translates to knowledge about the unobserved values of the units remaining in the population.
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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Meeden, G. (2011). Basu on Survey Sampling. In: DasGupta, A. (eds) Selected Works of Debabrata Basu. Selected Works in Probability and Statistics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5825-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5825-9_6
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