Efficient Sampling Design for Making Inference on Mean Estimation in Longitudinal Data

In many studies, a researcher attempts to describe a population where units are measured for multiple outcomes, or responses. In this paper, we present an efficient procedure based on ranked set sampling to estimate and perform hypothesis testing on a multivariate mean. The method is based on ranking on an auxiliary covariate, which is assumed to be correlated with the multivariate response, in order to improve the efficiency of the estimation. We show that the proposed estimator developed under this sampling scheme is unbiased, has smaller variance in the multivariate sense, and is asymptotically Gaussian. A bootstrap routine is developed in the statistical software R to perform inference when the sample size is small. We use a simulation study to investigate the performance of the method under known conditions and apply the method to the biomarker data collected in China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS 2009) data.