A finite population estimation study with Bayesian neural networks

In this article, we study the use of Bayesian neural networks in finite population estimation.We propose estimators for finite population mean and the associated mean squared error. We also propose to use the student t-distribution to model the disturbances in order to accommodate extreme observations that are often present in the data from social sample surveys. Numerical results show that Bayesian neural networks have made a significant improvement in finite population estimation over linear regression based methods