Balanced Repeated Replications Based on Mixed Orthogonal Arrays

Abstract

For stratified samples with arbitrary numbers of primary sampling units per stratum, one can divide the units in the stratum into two groups and then apply the balanced half-samples method to the two groups thus formed. The efficiency loss of the grouped balanced half-samples variance estimator can be substantial. Use of a mixed orthogonal array, whose numbers of symbols correspond to the numbers of units per stratum, gives a set of balanced subsamples. Unlike that of Gupta & Nigam (1987), the proposed method of analysis gives a consistent variance estimator and bias reduction for nonlinear statistics. To further reduce the number of replicates, use of nearly orthogonal arrays is considered.