The time series approach to estimation for repeated surveys - ARCHIVED

Papers by Scott and Smith (1974) and Scott, Smith, and Jones (1977) suggested the use of signal extraction results from time series analysis to improve estimates in repeated surveys, what we call the time series approach to estimation in repeated surveys. We review the underlying philosophy of this approach, pointing out that it stems from recognition of two sources of variation - time series variation and sampling variation - and that the approach can provide a unifying framework for other problems where the two sources of variation are present. We obtain some theoretical results for the time series approach regarding design consistency of the time series estimators, and uncorrelatedness of the signal and sampling error series. We observe that, from a design-based perspective, the time series approach trades some bias for a reduction in variance and a reduction in average mean squared error relative to classical survey estimators. We briefly discuss modeling to implement the time series approach, and then illustrate the approach by applying it to time series of retail sales of eating places and of drinking places from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Retail Trade Survey.