Theory & Methods: Unbiased estimators for restricted adaptive cluster sampling

Abstract

In adaptive cluster sampling the size of the final sample is random, thus creating design problems. To get round this, Brown (1994) and Brown & Manly (1998) proposed a modification of the method, placing a restriction on the size of the sample, and using standard but biased estimators for estimating the population mean. But in this paper a new unbiased estimator and an unbiased variance estimator are proposed, based on estimators proposed by Murthy (1957) and extended to sequential and adaptive sampling designs by Salehi & Seber (2001). The paper also considers a restricted version of the adaptive scheme of Salehi & Seber (1997a) in which the networks are selected without replacement, and obtains unbiased estimators. The method is demonstrated by a simple example. Using simulation from this example, the new estimators are shown to compare very favourably with the standard biased estimators.