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Estimation of a proportion in survey sampling using the logratio approach

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Abstract

The estimation of a mean of a proportion is a frequent task in statistical survey analysis, and often such ratios are estimated from compositions such as income components, wage components, tax components, etc. In practice, the weighted arithmetic mean is regularly used to estimate the center of the data. However, this estimator is not appropriate if the ratios are estimated from compositions, because the sample space of compositional data is the simplex and not the usual Euclidean space. We demonstrate that the weighted geometric mean is useful for this purpose. Even for different sampling designs, the weighted geometric mean shows excellent behavior.

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank Prof. Anne Ruiz-Gazen (Toulouse School of Economics) for helpful suggestions. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the paper. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support by the Operational Program Education for Competitiveness - European Social Fund (project CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0170 of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic).

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Correspondence to Karel Hron.

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Hron, K., Templ, M. & Filzmoser, P. Estimation of a proportion in survey sampling using the logratio approach. Metrika 76, 799–818 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00184-012-0416-6

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