Small-Area Estimation

Abstract

The term “small area” typically refers to a population for which reliable statistics of interest cannot be produced due to certain limitations of the available data. Examples of domains include a geographical region (e.g., a state, county or municipality), a demographic group (e.g., a specific age × sex × race group), a demographic group within a geographic region, and so forth. Some of the groundwork in small-area estimation related to the population counts and disease mapping research has been done by the epidemiologists and the demographers. The history of small-area statistics goes back to 11th- century England and 17th- century Canada. See Brackstone (1987) and Marshall (1991).