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November 2023 Newsletter: International Association of Survey Statisticians
IASS Podcast Stats and Stories
The recent podcast of Stats and Stories titled - Survey Statistics: Where is it Heading? by the IASS President, Natalie Shlomo, is available at this link.
About the IASS
The July 2023 issue of The Survey Statistician is out now and available here. It is a special edition to celebrate our 50-year jubilee!
Other than the static features Letter from the Editor, Letter from the President, Report from the Scientific Secretary, News and Announcements, this issue features contributions on the history of IASS and its role for the study and development of the theory and practice of sample surveys. Don’t miss contributing articles by Imbi Traat, J.N.K. Rao, Ton de Waal, Sander Scholtus, Jean-Francois Beaumont, Dennis Trewin, Ivan P. Fellegi, Eric Rancourt, Jae Kwang Kim, Wayne Fuller, Danny Pfeffermann, Isabel Molina Peralta, Mahmoud Torabi, Jairo Arrow, Monica Pratesi, Carl-Erik Sarndal, Daniel Thorburn, Siu-Ming Tam, Peter Wingfield-Digby, Graham Kalton, Denise Silva, Pedro Silva and Luigi Biggeri.
The New and Emerging Methods section features a paper by Prof. Changbao Wu (University of Waterloo, Canada) on Calibration Techniques for Model-based Prediction and Doubly Robust Estimation.
It is an extremely carefully crafted issue, for which we are very grateful to the Editors, and to Danuté Krapavickaite in particular for her care and dedication!
IASS Newsletters are available here.
The calendar of events is available on our Events page.
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Call for Conference Support for 2024
The International Association of Survey Statisticians (IASS) will consider providing financial support for workshops, conferences and similar events that:
- promote the study and development of the theory and practice of statistical surveys and censuses and associated subjects, and
- foster interest in these subjects among statisticians, organizations, governments, and the general public in different countries of the world.
The proposed conference, workshop or similar event must be well governed, with a clear organising structure (virtual or in-person), and an ability to account for the funding provided, in addition to give the IASS visible credit for the support provided. Preference will be given to:
- activities that promote sharing of knowledge and practice across a number of countries which would not normally have opportunities to share such knowledge and practice;
- facilitating attendance at such activities by people who would be otherwise unlikely to be able to attend, but whose presence would add appreciable value to the activity in terms of furthering IASS objectives; this attendance may be by a participant from a developing country, or a student, or it may be in terms of a teacher/presenter who would particularly enrich the event, who would otherwise be unlikely to attend; and
- forms of assistance that support IASS membership attendance at the event.
To apply for support, please send a document project, including a budget sheet, to IASS President Natalie Shlomo (Natalie.shlomo@manchester.ac.uk) and in cc to IASS President-Elect Partha Lahiri (plahiri@umd.edu) before June 30th, 2024. Applications should address the criteria set out above and comply with the mission of IASS. The total amount of funds available under this scheme will be € 1,800 in one year and will be shared to support more than one project.
IASS Webinar Series
The IASS Webinar Series continues to be a very successful initiative. The current timetable for upcoming IASS webinars is below. Note that CET is Central European Time. Links to register for the webinars are provided below. More details, such as abstracts will be directly emailed to registered members and can be viewed in the calendar of events. A list of previous IASS webinars with the presented slides can be found here while recordings for past webinars can be found at the ISI website. If you would like to contribute with suggestions for future speakers, please contact Andrés Gutierrez Rojas at andres.gutierrez@cepal.org.
- Webinar #35:
December 13 at 2pm – 3:30pm (CET).
Enhancing the Credibility of Survey Data: Old Tricks and New Techniques in Improving the Respondent Experience
Speaker: Barbara Rater, USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service.
Register your free seat
Calls for submissions
The ASA Educational Ambassador Program. Application Deadline: 15 December 2023.
The American Statistical Association (ASA) Committee on International Relations in Statistics (CIRS) is seeking qualified nationals from countries with demonstrated need and benefit to the country to serve as the 2024 Educational Ambassador (EA). The ASA will select one Educational Ambassador to attend the 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings and to take continuing education (CE) courses in emerging areas of research. The ambassador will then disseminate the subject matter related to at least one CE course in their home country and/or region.
For more details, visit the website.
Conferences on survey statistics and related areas
The deadline to submit proposals for Topic Contributed Sessions for ASA’s 2024 Joint Statistical Meeting (JSM) is 7 December 2023. More details are available here.
The IASS is sponsoring a session at the ISTAT Second Workshop on Methodologies for Official Statistics from 5 to 7 December 2023. The title of the session is: Machine Learning Methods in Survey Statistics, and will feature David Haziza, University of Ottawa, Canada and Petrus J.H. Daas of Statistics Netherlands. The full programme of the workshop is here. For online participation, register here.
Webinar on Society of Statistics, Computer and Applications Seminar- Challenges in the Production of Official Statistics with New Methods of Data Collection by Distinguished Research Professor Danny Pfefferman will be held via zoom on December 14, 2023. Time: 06.00 PM (India Time); 07.30 AM (East Coast time and Ontario time); 12.30 PM (UK Time and around); 01.30 PM (Europe Time); 02.30 PM (Israel Time). Register for the webinar.
SAE2023-2024 Conference – A conference celebrating the 65th birthday of Prof. Partha Lahiri will be held on 3-7 June 2024 at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. More information. The deadline for invited paper session is 15 March 2024 and the deadline of abstract submission is 15 March 2024.
PSD2024: Privacy in Statistical Databases 2024 - Nice, France, will be held on 25-27 September 2024. Submission deadline is 19 May 2024 where the submission can be done through this link. Details on the conference here.
Calls for nominations for the 2025 Waksberg Award
The journal Survey Methodology has established an annual invited paper series in honor of the late Joseph Waksberg to recognize his outstanding contributions to survey statistics and methodology.
Each year a prominent survey statistician is chosen to write a paper that reviews the development and current state of an important topic in the field of survey statistics and methodology. The paper reflects the mixture of theory and practice that characterized Joseph Waksberg’s work. The recipient of the Waksberg Award will receive an honorarium and give the 2025 Waksberg Invited Address at the Statistics Canada Symposium, expected to be held in the autumn of 2025. The paper will be published in an upcoming issue of Survey Methodology (Targeted for December 2025).
Nomination of individuals to be considered should be sent by email before 15 February 2024 to the
chair of the committee, Denise Silva (denisebritz@gmail.com). Nominations should include a CV and a nomination letter. Nominations remain active for 5 years.
Reading of the Month
The reading of the month is the invited discussion paper in the journal: Statistics in Transition New Series, Vol. 24 (3), 2023, entitled: Probability vs. Nonprobability Sampling: From the Birth of Survey Sampling to the Present Day, by Graham Kalton followed by discussions from Danny Pfeffermann; Risto Lehtonen; Julie Gershunskaya & Partha Lahiri; Ralf Munnich. The articles are available here.
In the article, Graham outlines the history of probability and non-probability sampling, and the growing use of nonprobability sampling. This is due to changes in societies’ views of surveys in general and the fact that current statistical programs are not designed to explicitly account for low response rates and high costs, the dirth of available non-survey data sources that can be adapted into statistical systems, and the growth of the internet and web-based data collections at low costs and high speed. There has been much research on enabling inference from non-probability samples through statistical modelling and calibration. It is a challenge to our IASS community to expand the horizons of survey statistics and to adapt to the future while ensuring that valid inference continues to be made possible.