Ranked Set Sampling

This monograph is the first book-length exposition of ranked set sampling. But, the subject matter is by no means new. The original notion of ranked set sampling, though not the technical term, was proposed by McIntyre in 1952. It was buried in the literature for quite a while. Its value was only re-discovered in recent years because of its cost-effective nature. Now, ranked set sampling has attracted practical interest in application areas such as agriculture, forestry, ecological and environmental science, and medical studies etc .. The theoretical foundations of the method has also been developed considerably, particularly during the last 15 years or so. A systematic exposition of the subject becomes necessary. This book covers every development of RSS since the birth of the original idea. Statistical inferences based on RSS are investigated from the originally intended estimation of a population mean to many more complicated pro­ cedures such as the inferences on smooth-function-of-means, quantiles and density functions, the distribution-free tests and regression analyses. Various variants of the original RSS scheme are explored, including RSS with imper­ fect judgment ranking or ranking by concomitant variables, adaptive RSS, multi-layer RSS and a variety of unbalanced RSS with certain optimalities.

This is the first book on the concept and applications of ranked set sampling. It provides a comprehensive review of the literature, and it includes many new results and novel applications.

Scientists and researchers on this subject will find a balanced presentation of theory and applications. The mathematical rigor of the theoretical foundations makes it beneficial to researchers. The detailed description of various methods illustrated by real or simulated data makes it useful for scientists and practitioners in application areas such as agriculture, forestry, sociology, ecological and environmental science, and medical studies. It can serve as a reference book and as a textbook for a short course at the graduate level.

Zehua Chen is Associate Professor of Statistics at the National University of Singapore. Zhidong Bai is Professor of Statistics at the National University of Singapore; he is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Bimal Sinha is the Presidential Research Professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County; he is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association.