Likelihood Methods for Basic Stratified Sampling, with Application to Von Bertalanffy Growth Model Estimation

摘要

This paper mainly addresses maximum likelihood estimation for a response-selective stratified sampling scheme, the basic stratified sampling (BSS), in which the maximum subsample size in each stratum is fixed. We derived the complete-data likelihood for BSS, and extended it as a full-data likelihood by incorporating incomplete data. We also similarly extended the empirical proportion likelihood approach for consistent and efficient estimation. We conducted a simulation study to compare these two new approaches with the existing estimation methods in BSS. Our result indicates that they perform as well as the standard full information likelihood approach. Methods were illustrated using a growth model for fish size at age, including between-individual variability. One of our major conclusions is that the fully observed BSS data, the partially observed data used for stratification, and the sampling strategy are all important in constructing a consistent and efficient estimator.