Choosing the stratification boundaries: The elusive optima

Abstract

Since Dalenius (1950) provided a set of equations for the determination of the stratum boundaries, there has been a proliferation of attempts to obtain the optimum stratum boundaries, those that minimise the variance of the Horvitz-Thompson estimator of mean or total. In this paper, we track the progress of such methods, and ask where we are now and where to go from here.