Hello all,
I have a client from a public sector that produces official statistics from survey and makes them available to public. Like many federal agencies, they have a guidline based on the magnitude of RSE (Relative Standard Error) to determine whether point estimates should be made public, made public with warnings, or suppressed.
They are planning to start providing information on a smaller geographical area. And RSE criteria being more of an art than science, they want to know if there are accepted criteria (used by any respectable agencies) for RSE specificially for the estimators based on smaller area. That is, do some agencies allow more lenient criteria for small area estimators than estimators based on larger samples?
Please note that this question is not about different approaches of small area estimation: I am aware of small area estimaton methods that "borrow information" from neighboring small areas and use auxillary predictors and, in turn, reduce RSE altogether. We are looking into that direction but at the same time, they want to know if some agencies have guidelines for reliability specifically suited for small area estimators.
Thank you in advance for your advice.
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Ryung Kim, PhD
Missional Consulting Group, LLC
Also Associate Professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
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