All Times ET
Keywords: order restrictions, isotonic regression, domain means, R
Recent work in survey domain estimation has shown that incorporating a priori assumptions about orderings of population domain means reduces the variance of the estimators, hence providing smaller confidence intervals with good coverage. The R package csurvey allows users to implement order and shape constraints using a design specified in the well known survey package. A test for constant versus increasing domain means is implemented, with generalizations to other one-sided tests. A novel method for estimating means in domains for which the sample size is zero is proposed, with a conservative variance estimate and confidence interval, and the method is extended to estimation and inference in domains with sample size of ten or smaller. Several examples with well-known survey data sets show the utility of the methods.
This package is now available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network at \url{http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=csurvey}.