Estimating variances of strata in ranked set sampling

In RSS, the variance of observations in each ranked set plays an important role in finding an optimal design for unbalanced RSS and in inferring the population mean. The empirical estimator (i.e., the sample variance in a given ranked set) is most commonly used for estimating the variance in the literature. However, the empirical estimator does not use the information in the entire data over different ranked sets. Further, it is highly variable when the sample size is not large enough, as is typical in RSS applications. In this paper, we propose a plug-in estimator for the variance of each set, which is more efficient than the empirical one. The estimator uses a result in order statistics which characterizes the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the rth order statistics as a function of the population CDF. We analytically prove the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator. We further apply it to estimate the standard error of the RSS mean estimator. Both our simulation and empirical study show that our estimators consistently outperform existing methods. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.