Basu’s Bears (Fat Bear Week and survey calibration)

It is my favorite holiday, Fat Bear Week:

Fat Bear Week – an annual celebration of success. All bears are winners but only one true champion will emerge. Held over the course of seven days and concluding on the Fat Bear Tuesday, people chose which bear to crown in this tournament style bracket where bears are pitted against each other for your vote.

(US citizens, please also vote Nov 5.)

As a survey statistician, I learned a lot about the use of auxiliary information from Basu’s (1971) elephants example. Thomas Lumley‘s book Complex Surveys has a great discussion of it in Chapter 7.

In honor of Fat Bear Week, I adapted Basu’s Elephants to Basu’s Bears in the cartoon below.

Questions:

1. If you worked at the National Park Service with the statistician and the park ranger, which sampling design and estimator would you use (it can be one not discussed in the cartoon) ?
2. What are your takeaways from Basu’s example ?
3. Who has your vote for Fat Bear Week ?
4. What are your favorite papers/books/posts about Basu’s example ?
5. A question for better illustrators than me (looking at you, Brendan Leonard, whose illustrations inspired me): would you like to remake this ? I think it can be more beautiful, more readable, and more fun.