Abstract
The term “small area” typically refers to a population for which reliable statistics of interest cannot be produced due to certain limitations of the available data. Examples of domains include a geographical region (e.g., a state, county or municipality), a demographic group (e.g., a specific age × sex × race group), a demographic group within a geographic region, and so forth. Some of the groundwork in small-area estimation related to the population counts and disease mapping research has been done by the epidemiologists and the demographers. The history of small-area statistics goes back to 11th- century England and 17th- century Canada.
It is seldom possible to have a large enough overall sample size to support reliable direct estimates for all the domains of interest. Therefore, it is often necessary to use indirect estimates that “borrow strength” by using values of the variables of interest from related areas, thus increasing the “effective” sample size. Rao ( 2003 ) Small Area Estimation
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Jiang, J. (2022). Small-Area Estimation. In: Large Sample Techniques for Statistics. Springer Texts in Statistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91695-4_13
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