Reverse-Engineering a Hypothetical Raking Process for the Estimation of Mean Squared Error of Raked Small Area Estimates
Articles and reports: 11-522-X202500100006Description: Small area estimation is frequently used to produce estimates at a disaggregated level where direct survey estimation does not have sufficient sample to produce precise estimates. Often this is done using the area-level Fay-Herriot model, by assuming the direct estimates are independent under the design and have a known variance, and applying a smoothing process to the variance estimates of the direct estimates to better meet that last assumption. It is not rare that small area estimates are benchmarked/raked to aggregated level direct estimates. This article shows that wrongly assuming independence can have a big impact on the MSE of the raked estimates. Values of the covariances between direct estimates are thus required for good point and MSE estimates. Getting good estimates of those covariances is difficult given the small sample sizes in some areas. An original way of deriving values for those covariances, by reverse-engineering a hypothetical raking process, is presented. Issue Number: 2025001Author(s): Verret, François; Walker, BraedanMain Product:Statistics Canada International Symposium Series: Proceedings
