Accuracy Measures of Empirical Bayes Estimator for Mean Rates

Abstract

The outcomes of counts commonly occur in the area of disease mapping for mortality rates or disease rates. A Poisson distribution is usually assumed as a model of disease rates in conjunction with a gamma prior. The small area typically refers to a small geographical area or demographic group for which very little information is available from the sample surveys. Under this situation the model-based estimation is very popular, in which the auxiliary variables from various administrative sources are used. The empirical Bayes estimator under Poissongamma model has been considered with its accuracy measures. An accuracy measure using a bootstrap samples adjust the underestimation incurred by the posterior variance as an estimator of true mean squared error. We explain the suggested method through a practical dataset of hitters in baseball games. We also perform a Monte Carlo study to compare the accuracy measures of mean squared error.