On measuring the variability of small area estimators under a basic area level model
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper based on a basic area level model we obtain second-order accurate approximations to the mean squared error of model-based small area estimators, using the Fay & Herriot (1979) iterative method of estimating the model variance based on weighted residual sum of squares. We also obtain mean squared error estimators unbiased to second order. Based on simulations, we compare the finite-sample performance of our mean squared error estimators with those based on method-of-moments, maximum likelihood and residual maximum likelihood estimators of the model variance. Our results suggest that the Fay–Herriot method performs better, in terms of relative bias of mean squared error estimators, than the other methods across different combinations of number of areas, pattern of sampling variances and distribution of small area effects. We also derive a noninformative prior on the model parameters for which the posterior variance of a small area mean is second-order unbiased for the mean squared error. The posterior variance based on such a prior possesses both Bayesian and frequentist interpretations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it