The blocked weighted bootstrap is an estimation technique for use with data from two-stage cluster sampled surveys in which either prior weighting (e.g. population-proportional sampling or PPS as used in Standardized Monitoring and Assessment of Relief and Transitions or SMART surveys) or posterior weighting (e.g. as used in Rapid Assessment Method or RAM and Simple Spatial Sampling Method or S3M surveys) is implemented.
You can install bbw from CRAN with:
install.packages("bbw")You can install the current development version of bbw from GitHub via
the remotes package with:
if(!require(remotes)) install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("rapidsurveys/bbw")bbw as used in RAM and S3M is a modification to the
percentile bootstrap to include blocking and weighting to account
for a complex sample design.
With RAM and S3M surveys, the sample is complex in the sense that it is an unweighted cluster sample. Data analysis procedures need to account for the sample design. A blocked weighted bootstrap can be used:
Blocked: The block corresponds to the primary sampling unit (PSU = cluster). PSUs are resampled with replacement. Observations within the resampled PSUs are also sampled with replacement.
Weighted: RAM and S3M samples do not use population
proportional sampling (PPS) to weight the sample prior to data
collection (e.g. as is done with SMART surveys). This means that a
posterior weighting procedure is required. bbw uses a “roulette
wheel” algorithm (see illustration below) to weight (i.e. by
population) the selection probability of PSUs in bootstrap replicates.
In the case of prior weighting by PPS all clusters are given the same weight. With posterior weighting (as in RAM or S3M) the weight is the population of each PSU. This procedure is very similar to the fitness proportional selection technique used in evolutionary computing.
A total of m PSUs are sampled with replacement for each bootstrap replicate (where m is the number of PSUs in the survey sample).
The required statistic is applied to each replicate. The reported estimate consists of the 0.025th (95% LCL), 0.5th (point estimate), and 0.975th (95% UCL) quantiles of the distribution of the statistic across all survey replicates.
The main reason to use bbw is that the bootstrap allows a wider range
statistics to be calculated than model-based techniques without resort
to grand assumptions about the sampling distribution of the required
statistic. A good example for this is the confidence interval on the
difference between two medians which might be used for many
socio-economic variables. The bbw also allows for a wider range of
hypothesis tests to be used with complex sample survey data.