The Cochran-Hansen Prize of the IASS is awarded every two years for the best paper on survey research methods submitted by a young statistician from a developing or transition country.
For the 2025 edition, the Cochran-Hansen Prize consists of research expenses up to €1500 for the winner to present his or her paper and receive recognition at the 65th World Statistics Congress of the International Statistical Institute to be held in The Hague, the Netherlands, 5-9 October 2025.
The prize will cover the WSC registration and travel expenses to the conference as well as participation in a short course. Participation in the competition for the prize was restricted to young statisticians from developing countries (Low and Middle-Income Countries) that are living in such countries and who were born in 1990 or later. A paper submitted for the competition needed to be original work which is either unpublished or has been published after February 28th, 2023.
The 2025 committee for the Cochran-Hansen competition consisted of Eric Rancourt (chair), Katherine Jenny Thompson and Li-Chun Zhang. A total of 9 papers from 7 countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Senegal, Tanzania and Turkey) were submitted to the competition. The committee unanimously decided to award the 2025 Cochran-Hansen prize to:
Dr. Saurav Guha (India) for his paper: “Small area estimation under a spatially correlated multivariate area-level model” that he co-authored with the late Hukum Chandra.
The paper was published in JRSS-A in 2023 and presents a spatial version of multivariate Fay–Herriot model with small area predictor. The residual maximum likelihood is employed for estimating the parameters of the proposed model. Analytical and bootstrap approaches for estimating the mean squared error (MSE) of the proposed predictor are also developed. The performance of the proposed predictor and the MSE estimators are evaluated through various simulation studies. The results evidently show that the proposed predictor outperforms the existing predictors. An application of the proposed methodology has also been made using the 2011–12 Consumer Expenditure Survey data of India.
Dr. Saurav Guha is Assistant Professor-cum-Jr. Scientist at the Department of Statistics, Mathematics & Computer Application in Bihar Agricultural University, Bhagalpur, Bihar, India. He obtained his MSc (2014) and PhD (2018) from the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute in New Delhi.
On behalf of the International Statistical Institute, congratulations!
