Equilibrated strategy for population variance estimation

摘要

Under the hypothesis that a statistical population can be represented by a density function in a similar way to that of the optimum stratification problem dealt with in Dalenius (1957) and Dalenius and Hodges (1959) the estimation of the population variance is analysed by means of the technique of equilibrated stratification. An unbiased estimator is suggested and it is shown that, with optimum allocation, the precision of the estimator for sufficiently large sample size is always at least that of the classical minimum variance unbiased estimator for a distribution-free setting. A numerical study complete the article.