In search of optimal survey designs

The US Census Bureau supports research into an optimal design program as an alternative to its current decennial redesign of demographic surveys. The optimal design program seeks to optimize redesign samples annually and reduce deterioration of the precision of survey estimates.

Initial research has focussed on the use of multi-agent systems (also known as distributed artificial intelligence) to produce optimal annual samples for all demographic surveys. The first multi-agent system optimizes redesign inputs. It represents each housing unit as an autonomous agent and solves the distributed constrain satisfaction problem (DCSP) to forecast household characteristics that are consistent with recent survey data and estimates. The second multi-agent system selects optimal samples for all demographic surveys. It represents each survey-state pair as a deliberative agent and applies the Bayesian optimization algorithm (BOA) at each design stage to partition the sampling units into sample and non-sample subsets. Thus, sampling units are selected directly, without the need for initial stratification.