Comparative Study of Different Penalty Functions and Algorithms in Survey Calibration

Abstract

The technique of calibration in survey sampling is a widely used technique in the field of official statistics. The main element of the calibration process is an optimization procedure, for which a variety of penalty functions can be used. In this chapter, we consider three of the classical penalty functions that are implemented in many of the standard calibration software packages. We present two algorithms used by many of these software packages, and explore the properties of the calibrated weights and the corresponding estimates when using these two algorithms with the classical calibration penalty functions.