Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods

The Korean Statistical Society (한국통계학회)
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An alternative method for estimating lognormal means

  • Kwon, Yeil (Department of Mathematics, University of Central Arkansas)
  • Received : 2021.01.07
  • Accepted : 2021.06.16
  • Published : 2021.07.31
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Abstract

For a probabilistic model with positively skewed data, a lognormal distribution is one of the key distributions that play a critical role. Several lognormal models can be found in various areas, such as medical science, engineering, and finance. In this paper, we propose a new estimator for a lognormal mean and depict the performance of the proposed estimator in terms of the relative mean squared error (RMSE) compared with Shen's estimator (Shen et al., 2006), which is considered the best estimator among the existing methods. The proposed estimator includes a tuning parameter. By finding the optimal value of the tuning parameter, we can improve the average performance of the proposed estimator over the typical range of σ2. The bias reduction of the proposed estimator tends to exceed the increased variance, and it results in a smaller RMSE than Shen's estimator. A numerical study reveals that the proposed estimator has performance comparable with Shen's estimator when σ2 is small and exhibits a meaningful decrease in the RMSE under moderate and large σ2 values.

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References

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