Incorporating User Input Into Optimal Constraining Procedures for Survey Estimates

We examine the incorporation of analyst input into the constrained estimation process. In the calibration literature, there are numerous examples of estimators with “optimal” properties. We show that many of these can be derived from first principles. Furthermore, we provide mechanisms for injecting user input to create user-constrained optimal estimates. We include derivations for common deviance measures with linear and nonlinear constraints and we demonstrate these methods on a contingency table and a simulated survey data set. R code and examples are available at https://github.com/mwilli/Constrained-estimation.git.