Conference on Statistical Science Honouring the Bicentennial of Stefano Franscini’s Birth: Ascona November 18–20, 1996

241 Pages·1997·8.427 MB·English

by  Carlo Malaguerra (auth.), Carlo Malaguerra, Stephan Morgenthaler, Elvezio Ronchetti (eds.)

M 0 n t e Proceedings of the Centro Stefano Franscini
Verita Ascona
Edited by H. Fluhler, ETH Zurich
Conference on
Statistical Science
Honouring the Bicentennial of
Stefano Franscini's Birth
Ascona
November 18-20, 1996
Edited by
C. Malaguerra
S. Morgenthaler
E. Ronchetti
Springer Basel AG
Editors:
Carlo Malaguerra Elvezio Ronchetti
Office federal de la statistique Departement d'Econometrie
Schwarztorstrasse 96 Universite de Geneve
CH-3003 Berne UNI-MAlL
Boulevard Car~Vogt 102
CH-1211 Geneve
Stephan Morgenthaler
Departement de Mathematiques
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
CH-1015 Lausanne
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library 01 Congress, Washington D_C_, USA
Die Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conference on Statistical Science Honouring the Bicentennial of
Stefano Franscini's Birth <1996>, Ascona:
Conference on Statistical Science Honouring the Bicentennial of
Stefano Franscini's Birth : Ascona, November 18-20,1996/ ed_ by
C_ Malaguerra ___ - Basel; Boston; Berlin : Birkhäuser, 1997
(Monte Veritil)
ISBN 978-3-0348-9832-4 ISBN 978-3-0348-8930-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-0348-8930-8
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be obtained.
© 1997 Springer Basel AG
Originally published by Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, Switzerland in 1997
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997
Camera-ready copy prepared by the editors.
Printed on acid-free paper produced lrom chlorine-free pulp. TCF ~
ISBN 978-3-0348-9832-4
987654321
Preface
The Conference on "Statistical Science", held in Monte Verita (Switzerland) on
18/20 November 1996, was intended to honour the memory of Stefano Franscini
at the occasion of the bicentennial of his birth (1796-1996). It was jointly
organized by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the Swiss
Federal Statistical Office and the University of Geneva. These proceedings gather
a selected collection of contributions presented by statisticians from universities,
research institutes and national statistical services of Europe, North America and
Asia.
Part I focuses on a historical appreciation of Stefano Franscini's life and work.
Authors develop a deep analysis of the historical context, the political action, the
scientific achievement and the intellectual legacy of the founding father of Swiss
official statistics. The reader thus has an opportunity to appreciate the various
facets of this exceptional man who not only drew the first comprehensive
statistical portrait of Switzerland but also established the foundations for modem
educational and political institutions.
Part II groups papers on the relationship between statistical science and official
statistics. Authors analyse the historical background, current context and new
perspectives of co-operation between scientific research and official statistical
services. They show how the relationship between both partners has evolved over
the past decades, stressing certain prerequisites and opportunities for effective
interaction between academia's scientific activity and the production of rigourous
statistical information.
Part III includes a series of studies on new and emerging methodological issues in
survey sampling and data analysis. These studies highlight some important
impacts of research on applied statistics -for data analysis in general and analysis
of survey data in particular. Authors thus open up concrete perspectives for
collaboration and intensified joint research efforts from both academia and
official statistical services.
The editors hope that these proceedings will reflect the wish for dialogue and
renewed partnership between statisticians from academia and official statisticians
-a wish which characterized the stimulating discussions in Monte Verita. Indeed,
co-operation constitutes a challenging opportunity for both partners: on the one
hand, it is essential for securing professionalism and scientific rigour in the
conception, production and analysis of official statistical information; on the
other hand, it enables scientists to apply and test their models and approaches to
the processing and analysis of large and complex datasets collected by official
statistical services.
This is undoubtedly the main conclusion of the Conference: despite their different
structures and roles, the scientific community and the community of official
statisticians share important common scientific interests and objectives. They
should therefore strive to encourage to a renewed partnership based on mutual
recognition, permanent dialogue and increased scientific interaction.
We take this opportunity to thank the many people from the Swiss Federal
Statistical Office in Berne and from the Centro Stefano Franscini in Monte Verita
who contributed with enthusiastic commitment to the success of the Conference.
A special vote of thanks goes to Mrs Nathalie Brunner-Patthey, who headed the
organising secretariat and prepared the papers for publication. We should also
like to express our gratitude to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich, the Swiss National Science Foundation and the government of Canton
Ticino, which generously supported the Conference.
C. Malaguerra S. Morgenthaler E. Ronchetti
Table of Contents
Part I
Opening of the Conference
Carlo Malaguerra...... ........ ...... ..... ................. ...... .......... ..... ....................... 3
Stefano Franscini: Statistics between Politics and History
Christian Marazzi.. ............... ....... ................. .... ................................... ...... 9
Franscini and the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology: the Beginnings
of Swiss Science Policy
Francis Waldvogel......... ........... .................... ............... ....... ....... .............. 15
Role and Influence of Stefano Franscini in the Educational System of
Switzerland
Konrad Osterwalder. ............................................................................... 21
Part II
The Partnership of Official Statistics and Academia: the International
Context
Zoltan Kenessey........... ....................... ..... ....... ............................. ....... ..... 33
Evolution of Economic and Social Statistics over two Centuries
Edmond Malinvaud................. ..... ............................................................ 49
Need for New Methods to Support Developments in Economic Statistics
Jacob Ryten...................... ........ ............. .................................... ............... 63
Official Statistics and Research: an Evolving Relationship seen through
the Classifications of Science
Paolo Garonna and Paola Geretto.... .................... ...................... ........... 77
Statistical Science and the European Statistical System: Expectations and
Perspectives
Yves Franchet and Photis Nanopoulos................................................. 105
Part III
Weighting and Calibration in Sample Survey Estimation
R. L. Chambers................ .................................................. .................... 125
Resampling Methods for Complex Survey Data
J.N.K. Rao .............................................................................................. 149
Measuring and Diagnosing the Efficiency of Electricity Services in
Buildings
Fabrizio Carlevaro ................................................................................ 157
Weighting the Swiss Labour Force Survey
Beat Hulliger, Andrea Ries, Tamara Comment and Ariane Bender ... 169
Longitudinal Analysis of Swiss Labour Force Survey Data
Paul-Andre Salalnin .............................................................................. 181
Control Charts for Multivariate Processes Based on Influence Functions
Luan Jaupi and Gilbert Saporta ........................................................... 193
Metrics and Models for Handwritten Character Recognition
Trevor Hastie and Patrice Simard. ....................................................... 203
Strategy Issues in Data Analysis
Peter J. Huber. ....................................................................................... 221
Promoting Public Awareness of Statistics Through Distance Education
Faiza Tabassulll ..................................................................................... 239
Conference on Statistical Science Honouring the Bicentennial of Stefano Franscini 's Birth 3
Monte Veritil, Switzerland
© Birkhliuser Verlag Basel 1997
Opening of the Conference
Carlo Malaguerra
I am delighted to welcome you to Ascona and to wish you a pleasant stay in the Centro
Stefano Franscini. The many colleagues and friends who have kindly agreed to attend
today's Conference on Statistical Science will undouptedly contribute to its success, and
I should like to thank them for attending.
I am particularly happy to greet you all in my home land, this southern corner of
Switzerland which offers a pleasant setting for our Conference. I hope that you will
appreciate the various facets and the unique character of Canton Ticino as an Italian
speaking and Latin-culture region which is a lively component of our multicultural and
plurilinguistic country.
As you may know, in the past, Ascona and its surrounding region was a remarkably
hospitable breeding ground for revolutionary thinking and cultural innovation. In the
course of the last hundred years, numerous scientists, artists, philosophers and political
leaders from all Europe sojourned here, met and developed a tradition of dialogue and
free thinking which today constitutes the real spirit of Monte VeritA.
As part of this creative and humanist tradition of Monte Verita, the Centro Stefano
Franscini provides an environment for cultural and scientific initiative. In particular, the
Centro regularly hosts international seminars promoted by the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology, which is organizing this Conference in conjunction with the University of
Geneva and the Swiss Federal Statistical Office.
The organizers are particularly glad to commemorate the bicentennial of Stefano
Franscini's birth in ''his Centro" and with a symposium which aims to deepen one
essential aspect of his concept of statistics: the need for rigourous scientific bases and
methods for developing official statistical information.
Franscini's political and scientific activities spanned a century that was attuned to the
Enlightement's ideals and adopted a positivist view of scientific and human progress.
The various facets of Franscini's career clearly reflect the spirit of his age. In his work as
a statistician and as a politician, he always referred to science as a precondition for
objective knowledge of economic and social facts - and this evidence was directly
linked to his conception of human development and "good government".
In chronological terms, the first example of this idea of the role of science appears in
his studies on education. These studies were explicitly aimed at modernizing Ticino's
education system. Thus, Franscini applied educational theory to a real social experience:
4 Opening of the Conference
in 1826 he established in Lugano the "scuola di mutuo insegnamento" - ie. the school
for mutual learning -which was, at the time, a revolutionary social innovation imported
from England. Franscini also published a little book entitled "Della pubblica istruzione
nel Cantone Ticino" (Developing public education in Canton Ticino) (Franscini 1828),
in which he denounced the social inequalities and pedagogic inadequacies of public
education and advocated a radical reform of the educational system. Then, when he
became Minister of Education for Ticino, he applied the most progressive social science
theories of his time, introducing compulsory education and laying the foundation for
modem legislation on schooling.
His view of science as a source and guide for social reform and coherent political
action becomes particUlarly evident in Franscini's statistical work. Like other scientists
of his day, Franscini favoured statistics as an objective basis for knowledge of reality.
To put it in a nutshell, his conception of statistical science can be defined as ''knowledge
of facts through figures". In this sense, he certainly supported the "factual"
epistemological approach defined by Adolphe Quetelet: 'Wherever things could be
expressed in figures, these figures were taken as a guide; counting took over from
discussing; words had to make way for facts ( ... ) Everything that can be expressed
numerically gets for calculations to deal with; the more sciences make progress, the
more they come under their influence, the more they seem to converge on them as a sort
of a common centre. One could even judge a science's degree of perfection by the ease
with which it can be dealt with in terms of figures, which tallies with the old saying that
is confirmed day in, day out: mundum numeri regunt" (Quetelet 1828).
It is interesting to note that one of Quetelet's best-known books - the "Instructions
populaires sur Ie calcul des probabilites" (Quetelet 1828) -was published the same year
as Franscini's first statistical study, the "Statistica della Svizzera" (Franscini 1827). In
the introduction to his study, Franscini states that: "You will find here and there in this
book a number of doctrines and theories. I should confess that this is not really required
by statistics, the main scope of which is to describe, in the most orderly and accurate
form, the facts at the source of the current situation of the country. But I nevertheless
refer to such doctrines and theories in this study to allow readers to appreciate with
deepened judgement the facts described here. And to be frank, my intention was to
promote the knowledge of these doctrines as well as that of facts" (Franscini 1827).
In other words, Franscini does not consider "statistics" merely as a framework of
mathematical methods and outputs. As in Melchiorre Gioja's "La Filosofia della
statistica" (Gioja 1826), in Franscini's "Statistica della Svizzera" (Franscini 1827) there
is a strong link between statistical work and the interpretative "doctrines and theories"
which were supposed to explain the meaning of facts.
In this sense, Franscini's approach to statistical science differs somewhat from the
much more deterministic views of Quetelet. Indeed, Quetelet considered that human and
social phenomena should be described and explained through mechanical laws. He
C. Malaguerra 5
believed that the true scientific mission of statistics was to do in the social sphere what
Newton had accomplished in the celestial sphere. Thus, his "social physics" was an
attempt to base social science on mathematical mechanics. In this perspective, Quetelet
considered that one of the main scientific problems to be solved consisted of "providing
a mathematical theory of man and animals considered as motors and machines". And, as
you know, it is in this context that he conducted substantial methodological work on the
issue of "l'homme moyen" -the average man.
In fact, Franscini was not really interested in this kind of theoretical developments.
He considered statistics mainly as an applied science and his work aimed at establishing
a comprehensive social science in the modern sense of this term. He was very interested
in statistical methods but he considered them as a tod for providing accurate
information. Of course, the concept of "statistical information" was unknown to
Franscini. Nevertheless, it now seems the most appropriate concept for characterizing
Franscini's achievement. His work aimed explicitly at three main objectives:
First of all, Franscini wanted to compile all sorts of relevant information in order to
develop a unified image of Switzerland as a national entity. Such a task was an
enormous challenge, because until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Swiss never
considered their country as a real nation but mainly as an alliance among sovereign
cantonal States. Although the cantons delegated ambassadors to the "Helvetic Diet",
their federal links were limited to reciprocal military aid to combat external threats from
other States. Switzerland as such - the Confederation - had no army, foreign policy,
treasure or revenue. Each canton constituted its own army, collected taxes and customs
duty and minted their own coins. Franscini realized that the building of an effective
Swiss nation required a stronger capacity for union based on a real national identity,
which was why his statistical work was geared to building a clear image of Switzerland
as a common homeland of all Swiss (Malaguerra 1996). As Paolo Garonna and
Francesca Sofia noted in a recent study, Franscini's aim was "to demonstrate that the
sense of Swiss identity and its form of affiliation were structured according to precise
social models, original aggregative forces at the cantonal level and specific cultural
idioms drawn from the best European liberal tradition. In other words, Franscini did not
simply "describe" the Swiss nation but contributed to its building through this statistical
indices on material well-being, on domestic trade and on prevailing cultural practices"
(Garonna and Sofia 1996). This was undoubtedly one of Franscini's main achievements:
his statistical portrait of the country contributed considerably to the development of a
new national awareness.
A second explicit objective of Franscini -as a statistician as well as a politician -was
to provide the statistical information required for the establishment of a modem federal
State and for the management of public affairs. Thanks to Franscini, it became evident
that statistical information was an esscntial instrument for "good government" and,
within the framework of the new institutional order heralded in by the Swiss