Response Propensity Estimation and Cross-Fitting

Abstract

This paper investigates whether five fold cross fitting improves nonresponse adjustment in survey estimation when flexible machine learning methods are used to estimate response propensities. We conduct a finite population Monte Carlo simulation with 90 experimental configurations and 2,000 replications per configuration, varying sample size, response rate, and the structure of the response mechanism. Logistic regression is used as a conventional parametric benchmark, while Random Forest and Gradient Boosting Machine are considered as flexible nonparametric models.