Affiliations: [a] Department of Mathematics and Statistics, CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Haryana, India | [b] Department of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Haryana Government, Panchkula (Haryana), India | [c] Department of Statistics, University of Lucknow, Lucknow, India
Correspondence:
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Corresponding author: Muhammed Jaslam Poolakkal, Intermountain Forestry Cooperative, Forest, Rangeland, and Fire Sciences, College of Natural Resources, University of Idaho, 875 Perimeter Dr MS 1133, Moscow 83844-1133, Idaho. E-mail: jaslam.stat@hau.ac.in.
Abstract: Crop statistics for a small area, such as the community development block, are an increasingly important topic in agricultural statistics. Under normality assumptions, the classic Empirical Best Linear Unbiased Prediction (EBLUP) technique is effective for predicting small area means, however the Small Area Estimation (SAE) model can be heavily affected by the incidence of outliers or deviations from the expected distribution. The purpose of this study was to estimate variance, predict block-level wheat crop yield in the Hisar and Sirsa district of Haryana by classical SAE method and a robust random-effect predictor using a slight generalization of Huber’s Proposal 2. In the case of Sirsa district, the results of classical and robust unit level SAE were very close, but not in the case of Hisar district. This could be due to the influential observation found in the Hisar data set. More accurate EBLUP wheat yield estimates are obtained when the Huber-type M-estimation method is initialized by the least square regression estimator.
Keywords: EBLUP, Huber-type M-estimation, Maximum likelihood, Mean squared prediction error, NDVI, Small area estimation
