Distribution Effect on the Efficiency of Some Classes of Population Variance Estimators Using Information of an Auxiliary Variable Under Simple Random Sampling

Abstract

In many sampling situations, researchers come across variety of data. These data are largely affected by the parent distribution. There are characteristics which some data share based on the parent distribution. These characteristics define their distribution as well as their behavior. The use of auxiliary variable in estimating a study variable has been on the increase. Auxiliary variable has been used in estimating population means as well as variances. The variance is very sensitive to distribution. Thus, estimating the variance using auxiliary variable might lead to some unexpected results. Hence the need to check the effect of the distribution of the performances of some selected classes of variance estimators. Twelve estimators were selected for comparison. Eight distributions were considered using simulation study. The selected distributions are: Normal, Chi-square, Uniform, Gamma, Exponential, Poisson, Geometric and Binomial. A population size of 330 was used while sample size of 30 was considered using simple random sample without replacement. The estimators were compared using Bias, and Mean Square Error. The performances of the estimators vary in some distributions. The gamma and exponential distributions showed wide variability. The performances of the estimators based on Bias is the same as that based on Mean Square Error. The Mean Square Errors were ranked. The best estimator is t1 followed be t10 and t12. The results showed that the estimators are not distribution free.