Related papers: Simplifying small area estimation with rFIA: a dem…
Small area estimation (SAE) improves estimates for local communities or groups, such as counties, neighborhoods, or demographic subgroups, when data are insufficient for each area. This is important for targeting local resources and…
When doing impact evaluation and making causal inferences, it is important to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the treatment effects for different domains (geographic, socio-demographic, or socio-economic). If the domain of interest is…
Small area estimation (SAE) plays a central role in survey statistics and epidemiology, providing reliable estimates for domains with limited sample sizes. The multivariate Fay-Herriot model has been extensively used for this purpose,…
Random Forests (RF) is a popular machine learning method for classification and regression problems. It involves a bagging application to decision tree models. One of the primary advantages of the Random Forests model is the reduction in…
The Fay-Herriot (FH) model is widely used in small area estimation and uses auxiliary information to reduce estimation variance at undersampled locations. We extend the type of covariate information used in the FH model to include…
Wildfires pose a significant global threat to ecosystems worldwide, with California experiencing recurring fires due to various factors, including climate, topographical features, vegetation patterns, and human activities. This study aims…
Traditional forest inventory systems, originally designed to quantify merchantable timber volume, often lack the spatial resolution and structural detail required for modern multi-resource ecosystem management. In this manuscript, we…
The Fay-Herriot model is a standard model for direct survey estimators in which the true quantity of interest, the superpopulation mean, is latent and its estimation is improved through the use of auxiliary covariates. In the context of…
Understanding historical forest dynamics, specifically changes in forest biomass and carbon stocks, has become critical for assessing current forest climate benefits and projecting future benefits under various policy, regulatory, and…
National Forest Inventories (NFIs) monitor forest attributes across a variety of spatial and temporal scales in a given country. Increased interest in reporting and management at smaller scales has driven NFIs to investigate and adopt small…
Combining machine learning with econometric analysis is becoming increasingly prevalent in both research and practice. A common empirical strategy involves the application of predictive modeling techniques to 'mine' variables of interest…
Fractional imputation (FI) is a relatively new method of imputation for handling item nonresponse in survey sampling. In FI, several imputed values with their fractional weights are created for each missing item. Each fractional weight…
Small area estimation models are essential for estimating population characteristics in regions with limited sample sizes, thereby supporting policy decisions, demographic studies, and resource allocation, among other use cases. The spatial…
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used in more applications, the need to consider and mitigate biases from the learned models has followed. Most works in developing fair learning algorithms focus on the offline setting. However, in many…
In surveys, the interest lies in estimating finite population parameters such as population totals and means. In most surveys, some auxiliary information is available at the estimation stage. This information may be incorporated in the…
The Rapid Carbon Assessment (RaCA) project was conducted by the US Department of Agriculture's National Resources Conservation Service between 2010-2012 in order to provide contemporaneous measurements of soil organic carbon (SOC) across…
With the rise in high resolution remote sensing technologies there has been an explosion in the amount of data available for forest monitoring, and an accompanying growth in artificial intelligence applications to automatically derive…
This paper promotes the use of random forests as versatile tools for estimating spatially disaggregated indicators in the presence of small area-specific sample sizes. Small area estimators are predominantly conceptualized within the…
This work develops formal statistical inference procedures for machine learning ensemble methods. Ensemble methods based on bootstrapping, such as bagging and random forests, have improved the predictive accuracy of individual trees, but…
Interpretability of learning algorithms is crucial for applications involving critical decisions, and variable importance is one of the main interpretation tools. Shapley effects are now widely used to interpret both tree ensembles and…