An alternative method for estimating lognormal means

For a probabilistic model with positively skewed data, a lognormal distribution is one of the key distributions that play a critical role. Several lognormal models can be found in various areas, such as medical science, engineering, and finance. In this paper, we propose a new estimator for a lognormal mean and depict the performance of the proposed estimator in terms of the relative mean squared error (RMSE) compared with Shen’s estimator (Shen et al. , 2006), which is considered the best estimator among the existing methods. The proposed estimator includes a tuning parameter. By finding the optimal value of the tuning parameter, we can improve the average performance of the proposed estimator over the typical range of σ 2 . The bias reduction of the proposed estimator tends to exceed the increased variance, and it results in a smaller RMSE than Shen’s estimator. A numerical study reveals that the proposed estimator has performance comparable with Shen’s estimator when σ 2 is small and exhibits a meaningful decrease in the RMSE under moderate and large σ 2 values.