Empirical Bayesian Method for the Estimation of Literacy Rate at Sub-district Level Case Study: Sumenep District of East Java Province

Abstract

This paper discusses Bayesian Method of Small Area Estimation (SAE) based on Binomial response variable. SAE method being developed to estimate parameter in small area due to insufficiency of sample. The case study is literacy rate estimation at sub-district level in Sumenep district, East Java Province. Literacy rate is measured by proportion of people who are able to read and write, from the population of 10 year-old or more. In the case study we used Social Economic Survey (Susenas)data collected by BPS. The SAE approach was applied since the Susenas data is not representative enough to estimate the parameters at sub-district level because it’s designed to estimate parameters in regional area (in scope of a district/city at minimum). In this research, the response variable being used was logit function trasformation of pi (the parameter of Binomial distribution). We applied direct and indirect approach for parameter estimation, both using Empirical Bayes approach. For direct estimation we used prior distribution of Beta distribution and Normal prior distribution for logit function (pi) and to estimate parameter by using numerical method, i.e integration Monte Carlo. For indirect approach, we used auxiliary variables which are combinations of sex and age (which is divided into five categories). Penalized Quasi Likelihood (PQL) was used to get parameter estimation of SAE model and Restricted Maximum Likelihood method (REML) for MSE estimation. Instead of Bayesian approach, we are also conducting direct estimation using classical approach in order to evaluate the quality of the estimators. This research gives some findings, those are: Bayesian approach for SAE model gives the best estimation because having the lowest MSE value compares to the other methods. For the direct estimation, Bayesian approach using Beta and logit Normal prior distribution give a very similar result to the direct estimation with classical approach since the weight of is too large, which is about 0.905. It is also found that direct estimation using Bayesian approach with the Beta prior distribution gives better MSE than using logit normal prior distribution.