TITLE:
The Use of Spatial Sampling Designs in Business Surveys
AUTHORS:
Maria Michela Dickson, Roberto Benedetti, Diego Giuliani, Giuseppe Espa
KEYWORDS:
Spatial Sampling Design, Business Surveys, Horvitz-Thompson Estimator, Spatial Balance
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Statistics,
Vol.4 No.5,
August
7,
2014
ABSTRACT: An innovative use
of spatial sampling designs is here presented. Sampling methods which consider
spatial locations of statistical units are already used in agricultural and
environmental contexts, while they have never been exploited for establishment
surveys. However, the rapidly increasing availability of geo- referenced
information about business units makes that possible. In business studies, it
may indeed be important to take into account the presence of spatial
autocorrelation or spatial trends in the variables of interest, in order to
have more precise and efficient estimates. The opportunity of using the most
innovative spatial sampling designs in business surveys, in order to produce
samples that are well spread in space, is here tested by means of Monte Carlo experiments.
For all designs, the Horvitz-Thompson estimator of the population total is used
both with equal and unequal inclusion probabilities. The efficiency of sampling
designs is evaluated in terms of relative RMSE and efficiency gain compared
with designs ignoring the spatial information. Furthermore, an evaluation of
spatially balancing samples is also conducted.