On Rao’s Weighted Distributions for Modeling the Dynamics of Wildfires and Air Pollution

Among the numerous contributions of C. R. Rao to the field of statistics, his formulation of weighted probability distributions in 1963 has received relatively less attention. Yet, the topic has been found relevant to many theoretical and applied areas of statistics, and could, in fact, be even more meaningful in the current era of big data. We provide a brief introduction to the topic, its historical context, and some recent advances. We illustrate the continuing relevance of the framework with an application to environmental monitoring data on wildfires and air pollution.