How to estimate the number of cars in a city?
1 min readSep 9, 2019
I came across this question asked in context of product manager interviews, and the answers hovering around a series of guesstimates around demographics, city conditions etc leading to a final “guesstimate”.
However I realized there is a elegant statistical solution to this problem, therefore making this an interesting question for a data scientist interview too. I documented the answer and mathematical proof of the same on quora — please feel free to check out and share your comments.
However in the meantime, I also learnt that this is also referred to as the German Tank problem, a reference to the fact that the allied forces used the serial numbers of the captured tanks to estimate the number of tanks that the Germans had manufactured!
