Paired double-ranked set sampling

In environmental monitoring and assessment, the main focus is to achieve observational economy and to collect data with unbiased, efficient and cost-effective sampling methods. Ranked set sampling (RSS) is one traditional method that is mostly used for accomplishing observational economy. In this article, we propose an unbiased sampling scheme, named paired double RSS (PDRSS) for estimating the population mean. We study the performance of the mean estimators under PDRSS based on perfect and imperfect rankings. It is shown that, for perfect ranking, the variance of the mean estimator under PDRSS is always less than the variance of mean estimator based on simple random sampling, paired RSS and RSS. The mean estimators under RSS, median RSS, PDRSS, and double RSS are also compared with the regression estimator of population mean based on SRS. The procedure is also illustrated with a case study using a real data set.