A Joint Confidence Region for an Overall Ranking of Populations

Abstract

Summary National statistical agencies lack statistical methodology to express uncertainty in their released estimated overall rankings. For example, the US Census Bureau produced an ‘explicit’ ranking of the states based on observed sample estimates during 2011 of mean travel time to work. Current literature provides measures of uncertainty in estimated individual ranks, but not a direct measure of uncertainty for the estimated overall ranking. We construct and visualize a joint confidence region for the true unknown overall ranking that provides a measure of uncertainty in the estimated overall ranking.