Mean repair costs of dwellings in Scottish unitary authorities:
An application of shrinkage.
proportions
N. T. Longford and C. Macintyre
Abstract
The principal aim of the Scottish House Condition Survey is to collect
information about the extent of disrepair of the housing stock in
Scotland. The survey data, collected in 1996 on over 18,000
dwellings, is used for making inferences about the mean and total
repair costs. In this paper, we analyse the subset of 4640 dwellings
owned and managed by the local authorities. We explore how the data
could be used to estimate the mean repair costs of such dwellings in
each of the 32 unitary authorities in Scotland. For the largest
authorities, which are represented in the survey by large enough
subsamples, straightforward estimation by the sample means is
satisfactory. We show that the estimation of the mean repair costs in
the smallest authorities is greatly improved by shrinkage. A
multivariate extension of the method is applied to estimate the
authority-level means within the categories defined by the age and
location (urban or rural) of the dwellings.
In R. Banks et al. (Eds.) Leading Survey and Statistical Computing
into the New Millenium. Proceedings of the Third ASC International
Conference, Edinburgh, 22-24th September 1999, pp. 347-354, (1999).