Meet Statistics summer scholar Rahul Singhal 

Every year, the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland offers summer scholarships to a number of students so they can work with staff on real-world projects. Rahul Singhal, right, is working on a project called Developing Bias Weights for the New Zealand Longitudinal Census with Professor Alan Lee. Rahul explains:

“The project attempts to adjust for linkage bias in the New Zealand longitudinal census – to reduce this bias as much as possible.

“When we link people from one census to another, those people who have been linked may differ from those that could not be linked, that is, the non-linked people may have different characteristics from the linked people.

“The bias can result in a tendency to overestimate or underestimate important relationships between variables, such as the effect of a person’s occupation on mortality risk.  This tendency could potentially result in incorrect conclusions. Thus, this project could be very helpful for other projects that use the New Zealand Longitudinal Census to investigate the effect of different variables.

“I have just finished my conjoint BA/BCom degree in Statistics, Economics, Accounting and Finance.  Statistics has interested me ever since I took the Statistics 108 course, Statistics for Commerce, in which I learned about the power and flexibility of statistics. It is the main reason why I decided to go from a single degree to a conjoint degree.

“I don’t have too much planned for my summer break, just visiting family in India, as I haven’t seen them for a few years.”