A method for medical screening is adapted to differential item functioning (DIF). Its essential elements are explicit declarations of the level of DIF that is acceptable and of the loss function that quantifies the consequences of the two kinds of inappropriate classification of an item. Instead...

Summary A class of composite estimators of small area quantities that exploit spatial (distance-related) similarity is derived. It is based on a distribution-free model for the areas, but the estimators are aimed to have optimal design-based properties. Composition is applied also to estimate...

The European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) is the main source of information about poverty and economic inequality in the member states of the European Union. The sample sizes of its annual national surveys are sufficient for reliable estimation at the national level...

Decision theory is applied to the problem of identifying a small fraction of observations that contaminate a random sample from a specified distribution. The uncertainty about the parameters that characterise the contamination is addressed by sensitivity analysis. The analyst's (or the client's)...