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Estimate total attendance from size-biased reservation sample

WaymoData Scientist · Technical Screen

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This question evaluates understanding of size-biased sampling, selection bias correction, finite-population total estimation, and uncertainty quantification in survey sampling.

You run a restaurant with N = 10,000 reservations in a day. Each reservation j has:

  • Reserved party size: (R_j) (positive integer)
  • Actual number of people who show up: (S_j) (can be (<), (=), or (>) (R_j))

To reduce measurement effort, you only observe ((R,S)) for a sample of n = 1,000 reservations. The sampling is size-biased:

  • A reservation with reserved size 10 is twice as likely to be sampled as a reservation with reserved size 5.
  • More generally, assume the sampling probability is proportional to reserved size: (\Pr(\text{reservation } j \text{ is sampled}) \propto R_j).

Task

Using the 1,000 sampled pairs ((R_i,S_i)), estimate the total number of people who would show up across all 10,000 reservations:

[ T_S = \sum_{j=1}^{10000} S_j. ]

State any assumptions needed, and explain how you would quantify uncertainty (e.g., a confidence interval).