IMPROVED ESTIMATION OF A FINITE POPULATION MEAN BASED ON PAIRED OBSERVATIONS

This paper considers an improvement of the customary estimator of a finite population mean under a single stage sampling design when paired data are available on each unit of the sample. Guided by the well known problem of "common mean", a mixture i.e. a weighted combination of the mean of the principal characteristic and that of the auxiliary (possibly transformed) characteristic is proposed. It is shown that, under some conditions, improvement (with respect to MSE) over the traditional estimator is possible for a broad range of the values of the mixing constant. An estimator of the MSE of the proposed estimator is also provided.