Information content of partially rank-ordered set samples

Abstract: Partially rank-ordered set (PROS) sampling is a generalization of ranked set sampling in which rankers are not required to fully rank the sampling units in each set, hence having more flexibility to perform the necessary judgemental ranking process. The PROS sampling has a wide range of applications in different fields ranging from environmental and ecological studies to medical research and it has been shown to be superior over ranked set sampling and simple random sampling for estimating the population mean. In this paper, we study the Fisher information content and uncertainty structure of the PROS samples and compare them with those of simple random sample (SRS) and ranked set sample (RSS) counterparts of the same size from the underlying population. We study the uncertainty structure in terms of the Shannon entropy, Renyi entropy and Kullback-Leibler (KL) discrimination measures. Several examples including the FI of PROS samples from the location-scale family of distributions as well as a regression model are discussed.