232 – From Ranch to Rain: Government Statistics on Agriculture and Weather
Estimation of Capture Probabilities by Accounting for Sample Designs
Jake Abernethy
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
Luca Sartore
National Institute of Statistical Sciences
Habtamu K. Benecha
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)
Clifford Spiegelman
Texas A&M University
The United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) conducts the Census of Agriculture every five years to estimate the number of U.S. farms, as well as other agriculturally related population totals. NASS applies a Dual-System Estimation (DSE) methodology on data collected from the Census and the June Area Survey (JAS) to estimate the number of farms in the U.S.. Traditional multinomial-based capture-recapture methodology requires a model to estimate the probability of capture for every captured operation on either surveys. Of course, the selection probabilities associated with the JAS area frame design are different from those associated with the census. Such a difference makes it difficult to compute the exact JAS selection probabilities for farm records captured only by the census. For this reason, we propose and compare three methods for estimating the overall capture probability. The first two methods involve approximating the JAS selection probabilities and the third conditions them out. We compare these three techniques to investigate their precision through a simulation study.