FBS concludes training on Sampling Techniques
By Asim Hussain

ISLAMABAD—Federal Bureau of Statistics (FBS) concluded its two-week training programme on “Sampling Techniques, with reference to Household Survery” here on Saturday.
The two-week long training programme was conducted by Armando R.Levinson,an internationally renowned statistician. A number of topics on Sampling Techniques were covered during the programme which included Data Description, Measures of Central Tendency and Dispersion, Probability, Random Variables, Mathematical Expectations, Probability Distributions, Simple Random Sampling, Cluster Sampling, Stratified Sampling,
Systematic Sampling, Interval Estimation for Population Means and Proportions, Testing of Hypothesis and Testing of a Population mean of Population totals for large samples.
The course was attended by 18 participants belonging to FBS, PCO, PIDEand International Islamic University, Islamabad. The training was conducted to enhance the technical and professional skills of the working statisticians.
Speaking at the concluding ceremony of the training programme, Secretary Statistics Division, Asad Elahi informed the participants that the Statistics Division has been conducting international training courses with the close collaboration of various donor agencies like UNFPA, GTZ, DFID and ILO for capacity building of the employees of the federal and provincial governments.
He stressed upon the participants, particularly the youth, to apply the latest techniques for gauging the impact of various plans and polices of the government on development of the country. Expressing the view that the present age was the age of intellectualrevolution, he said, only those nations would make accelerated progress who acquire the latest knowledge through continuous capacity building efforts.
He stressed upon the donor agencies to come forward for providing suitable assistance to enhance the training facilities in Pakistan so that more and more Pakistani statisticians could be trained for production of quality data. R Levinson also spoke on the occasion and stressed upon the participants to utilize the knowledge they acquired from the training programme for the betterment of economy of the country.
Earlier, in his welcome address, Principal FBS Training Wing, Muhammad Younis briefly introduced the participants about the activities of the department. He said that about 27 training courses including 16 international courses were organized by FBS since its shifting from Lahore to Islamabad in July 2005. As many as 480 perHe said, the training would not only improve the efficiency, accuracy and timeliness of data production but also prove advancement in the field of sampling.