Estimation of confidence intervals for quantiles in a finite population

Abstract

Confidence intervals provide a way of reporting an estimate of a population quantile along with some information about the precision of estimates. Some procedures that may be used to obtain estimates of confidence intervals for quantiles in a finite population (most of which are based on resampling) are compared in the paper. A simulation study, based on two different artificial populations, is performed and comparisons of the estimation methods proposed for confidence intervals of population quantiles are made.

Key words:

• quantile
• confidence interval
• finite population
• bootstrap
• jackknife