R help - Jan 2010 - Sampling theory

Hi there,

are there any R-packages for computations required in sampling theury 
(such as confidence intervals under random, stratified, cluster sampling; 
I'd be partoculary interested in confidence intervals for the population 
variance, which is difficult enough to find even in books)?

Thanks,
Christian

*** --- ***
Christian Hennig
University College London, Department of Statistical Science
Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, phone +44 207 679 1698
chrish at stats.ucl.ac.uk, www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakche

On Tue, 19 Jan 2010, Christian Hennig wrote:
> are there any R-packages for computations required in sampling theury (such
> as confidence intervals under random, stratified, cluster sampling; I'd
be
> partoculary interested in confidence intervals for the population variance,
> which is difficult enough to find even in books)?
>
Yes, these are in the survey package, for fairly general designs, using
linearization or replicate weights.

  I don't know how good the confidence intervals for the variance are. One
of the disadvantages of implementing survey estimators in a general way is that
you lose the opportunity to use bias corrections that are only available for
simple cases.

The forthcoming version 3.19 (later this week) has nicer output for the
population variance, but the computations are still the same.

     -thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle