Improved Estimation from Ranked Set Sampling

Ranked set sampling is used when the measurement or quantification of units of the variable under study is difficult but the ranking of units of sets of small sizes can be done easily by an inexpensive method. Dell and Clutter (1972) showed that the sample mean based on ranked set sample is more efficient than the sample mean based on simple random sample with replacement sampling procedure for estimation of the population mean. In this paper Dell and Clutter estimator has been improved further by using the ranking variable x as an auxiliary variable when μx, the population mean of x is unknown. An empirical investigation based on life data shows all proposed estimators are approximately unbiased and bring gain in efficiency of up to 50 percent.