My chancy life as a Statistician
Section 5. Post retirement: 2000-present
I took early retirement in 2000, two years before the mandatory 65, but I have not really slowed down since my retirement 17 years ago. I almost died in 2002 of cardiac arrest without any prior symptoms, but by chance it happened in the hospital and I was saved. I was able to complete my Wiley book on small area estimation (Rao, 2003) and I am happy to see that it is well received and highly cited. I had excellent collaborators in small area estimation (SAE), including Isabel Molina, Malay Ghosh, Partha Lahiri, Gauri Datta, Jiming Jiang, Bal Nandram, Kalyan Das, Sharon Lohr, Domingo Morales, Leyla Mohadjer, Hussain Chowdhry and Tatsuya Kubokawa. By chance, I met Isabel Molina at the ISI meetings in Lisbon and she invited me to Madrid to give a workshop. This led to close collaboration on SAE with her and our paper on empirical Bayes (EB) estimation of complex small area parameters, such as poverty indicators, received the best paper award in 2010 from the Canadian Journal of Statistics (Molina and Rao, 2010). Measurement of poverty indicators for small areas received considerable attention after the World Bank promoted a method based on simulated censuses. In the 2010 paper we showed that the EB method can be considerably more efficient. I also collaborated with Molina on the second edition of my Wiley book (Rao and Molina, 2015). I was very fortunate to have two excellent students, M. Torabi and M. Diallo, working on SAE after my retirement. I also supervised another excellent student, David Haziza, on missing data and imputation. All three are “rising stars” and Haziza is also an ASA Fellow and received the prestigious Gertrude Cox Award for 2018.
I am happy that several of my collaborators participated in the China Conference as plenary speakers and contributed to this joint special issue of ISR and Survey Methodology. My thanks are due to them as well as to other speakers who have contributed to the joint special issue.
All in all, my chancy life as a Statistician has been very rewarding and satisfying. It was a great pleasure to work with many excellent researchers and graduate students. I owe it to my algebra teacher C. D. Murthy, to Professor M.C. Chakrabarti, to my mentor Professor H.O. Hartley, to my mother and to my wife for whatever success I have achieved in my chancy life as a Statistician over the past 60 years.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper appeared soon after my retirement in a 2004 newsletter of the International Indian Statistical Association (IISA). I thank the IISA Executive for giving permission to update the paper for publication in the joint special issues of ISR and Survey Methodology.
References
Basu, D. (1971). An essay on the logical foundations of survey sampling, part I. In Foundations of Statistical Inference, (Eds. V.P. Godambe and D.A. Sprott), Toronto: Holt, Rienhart and Winston, 203-243.
Dempster, A.P., Laird, N.M. and Rubin, D.B. (1977). Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm (with discussion). Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 39, 1-38.
Ericson, W.A. (1969). Subjective Bayesian models in sampling finite populations. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 31, 195-224.
Fuller, W.A., and Rao, J.N.K. (2001). A regression composite estimator with application to the Canadian Labour Force Survey. Survey Methodology, 27, 1, 45-51. Paper available at https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/12-001-x/2001001/article/5853-eng.pdf.
Hartley, H.O., and Rao, J.N.K. (1962). Sampling with unequal probabilities and without replacement. Annals of Mathematical Statistics, 33, 350-374.
Hartley, H.O., and Rao, J.N.K. (1967). Maximum likelihood estimation for the mixed analysis of variance model. Biometrika, 54, 93-108.
Hartley, H.O., and Rao, J.N.K. (1968). A new estimation theory of sample surveys. Biometrika, 55, 547-557.
Hartley, H.O., Rao, J.N.K. and Kiefer, G. (1969). Variance estimation with one unit per stratum. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 64, 841-851.
Harville, D.A. (1977). Maximum likelihood approaches to variance component estimation and to related problems. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 72, 322-340.
Krewski, D., and Rao, J.N.K. (1981). Inference from stratified samples: properties of linearization, jackknife and balanced repeated replication. Annals of Statistics, 9, 1010-1019.
Molina, I., and Rao, J.N.K. (2010). Small area estimation of poverty indicators. The Canadian Journal of Statistics, 38, 369-385.
Owen, D. (1988). Empirical likelihood ratio confidence intervals for a single functional. Biometrika, 75, 237-249.
Patterson, H.D., and Thompson, R. (1971). Recovery of inter-block information when block sizes are unequal. Biometrika, 58, 545-554.
Platek, R., Rao, J.N.K., Särndal, C.-E. and Singh, M.P. (Eds.). (1987). Small Area Statistics, New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Prasad, N.G.N., and Rao, J.N.K. (1990). The estimation of the mean squared error of small area estimator. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 85, 163-171.
Rao, C.R. (1970). Estimation of heteroscedastic variances in linear models. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 65, 161-172.
Rao, C.R. (1971). Some aspects of statistical inference in problems of sampling from finite populations. In Foundations of Statistical Inference, (Eds., V.P. Godambe and D.A. Sprott), Toronto: Wiley, 177-202.
Rao, J.N.K. (1966). Alternative estimators in PPS sampling for multiple characteristics. Sankhyā, Series A, 28, 47-60.
Rao, J.N.K. (2003). Small Area Estimation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Rao, J.N.K., and Graham, J.E. (1964). Rotation designs for sampling on repeated occasions. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 59, 492-509.
Rao, J.N.K., and Molina, I. (2015). Small Area Estimation, Second Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley.
Rao, J.N.K., and Scott, A.J. (1981). The analysis of categorical data from complex sample surveys: Chi-squared tests for goodness of fit and independence in two-way tables. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 76, 221-230.
Rao, J.N.K., and Scott, A.J. (1984). On chi-squared tests for multiway contingency tables with cell proportions estimated from survey data. Annals of Statistics, 15, 385-397.
Rao, J.N.K., and Wu, C.F.J. (1988). Resampling inference with complex survey data. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 83, 231-241.
Rao, J.N.K., Hartley, H.O. and Cochran, W.G. (1962). On a simple procedure of unequal probability sampling without replacement. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B, 24, 482-491.
Rao, J.N.K., Wu, C.F.J. and Yue, K. (1992). Some recent work on resampling methods for complex surveys. Survey Methodology, 18, 2, 209-217. Paper available at https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/12-001-x/1992002/article/14486-eng.pdf.
Shao, J., and Tu, D. (1995). The Jackknife and Bootstrap. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Singh, A.C., Kennedy, B. and Wu, S. (2001). Regression composite estimation for the Canadian Labour Force Survey with a rotating panel design. Survey Methodology, 27, 1, 33-44. Paper available at https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/12-001-x/2001001/article/5852-eng.pdf.
- Date modified: