BACKGROUND The Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions of the People on Health and Welfare (CSLC) is a major source of health data in Japan. The CSLC is not strictly based on probabilistic sampling, but instead uses an equal allocation of sample clusters to yield equal standard errors of estimates across prefectures. This study compared the performance of this sample design in measuring popul...

Recent studies have shown the X-bar control chart with variable sampling interval detects shifts in the process mean faster than the traditional X-bar chart. These studies are usually based on the assumption that the process data are independently and normally distributed. However, many situations in practice violate these assumptions. In this study, a methodology is developed to economically ...

We develop a Bayesian approach to sample size computations for surveys designed to provide evidence of freedom from a disease or from an infectious agent. A population is considered "disease-free" when the prevalence or probability of disease is less than some threshold value. Prior distributions are specified for diagnostic test sensitivity and specificity and we test the null hypothesis that ...