Bayesian Benchmarking Small Area Estimation via Entropic Tilting

Abstract: Benchmarking estimation and its risk evaluation is a practically important issue in small area estimation. While hierarchical Bayesian methods have been widely adopted in small area estimation, a unified Bayesian approach to benchmarking estimation has not been fully discussed. This work employs an entropic tilting method to modify the posterior distribution of the small area parameters to meet the benchmarking constraint, which enables us to obtain benchmarked point estimation as well as reasonable uncertainty quantification. Using conditionally independent structures of the posterior, we first introduce general Monte Carlo methods for obtaining a benchmarked posterior and then show that the benchmarked posterior can be obtained in an analytical form for some representative small area models. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method through simulation and empirical studies.