Rounded data analysis based on ranked set sample

In this paper we investigate the Fisher information matrix of a rounded ranked set sampling (RSS) sample and show that the sample is always more informative than a rounded simple random sampling (SRS) sample of the same size. On the other hand, we propose a new method to approximate maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) of unknown parameters for this model and further establish the strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators. Simulation experiments show that the approximated MLE based on rounded RSS is always more efficient than those based on rounded SRS.