A comparison of estimators of mean and its functions in finite populations

Several well known estimators of finite population mean and its functions are investigated under some standard sampling designs. Such functions of mean include the variance, the correlation coefficient and the regression coefficient in the population as special cases. We compare the performance of these estimators under different sampling designs based on their asymptotic distributions. Equivalence classes of estimators under different sampling designs are constructed so that estimators in the same class have equivalent performance in terms of asymptotic mean squared errors (MSEs). Estimators in different equivalence classes are then compared under some superpopulations satisfying linear models. It is shown that the pseudo empirical likelihood (PEML) estimator of the population mean under simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR) has the lowest asymptotic MSE among all the estimators under different sampling designs considered in this paper. It is also shown that for the variance, the correlation coefficient and the regression coefficient of the population, the plug-in estimators based on the PEML estimator have the lowest asymptotic MSEs among all the estimators considered in this paper under SRSWOR. On the other hand, for any high entropy $\pi$PS (HE$\pi$PS) sampling design, which uses the auxiliary information, the plug-in estimators of those parameters based on the H\'ajek estimator have the lowest asymptotic MSEs among all the estimators considered in this paper.