--- title: "geoaddSAE2-intro" output: rmarkdown::html_vignette vignette: > %\VignetteIndexEntry{geoaddSAE2-intro} %\VignetteEngine{knitr::rmarkdown} %\VignetteEncoding{UTF-8} --- ```{r, include = FALSE} knitr::opts_chunk$set(collapse = TRUE, comment = "#>", warning = FALSE, message = FALSE) ``` ## Background `geosae` fits the **area-level Geoadditive Small Area Estimation (Geoadditive SAE)** model: a semiparametric extension of the Fay-Herriot model in which - linear covariate effects are modelled as usual, - nonlinear covariate effects are modelled with penalized splines (P-splines), and - spatial variation is modelled with a bivariate thin plate regression spline, all represented jointly as a linear mixed model and fitted by Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML). The Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the resulting small area predictor is obtained by parametric bootstrap. The classical Fay-Herriot (FH) and Spatial Fay-Herriot (SFH) models are **not** re-implemented: `geosae` calls the existing implementations by the `sae` package so that the three approaches can be fitted and compared consistently. ## A minimal example ```{r setup} library(geoaddSAE2) data(simulated_sae) head(simulated_sae) ``` `simulated_sae` has a direct estimator `y`, a known sampling variance `vardir`, a linear covariate `x1`, a nonlinear covariate `x2`, and spatial coordinates `lat`/`lon`. ### Geoadditive SAE only ```{r} fit <- geosae( data = simulated_sae, formula = y ~ x1, vardir = vardir, nonlinear = "x2", spatial = c("lat", "lon"), bootstrap = TRUE, B = 50, seed = 1 ) fit ``` ```{r} summary(fit) ``` ### Comparing Geoadditive SAE, Fay-Herriot, and Spatial Fay-Herriot Set `compare = TRUE` to also fit FH (always) and SFH (whenever `spatial` is supplied), and get a side-by-side comparison table. ```{r} fit_cmp <- geosae( data = simulated_sae, formula = y ~ x1, vardir = vardir, nonlinear = "x2", spatial = c("lat", "lon"), compare = TRUE, B = 50, seed = 1 ) fit_cmp$comparison ``` ## Inspecting results A fitted `geosae` object cleanly separates: - `fit$estimation` -- direct estimate, geoadditive estimate, MSE, RMSE per area; - `fit$diagnostics` -- convergence, EDF of smooth terms, variance components, R-sq, deviance explained; - `fit$parameters` -- fixed-effect (linear) coefficient table; - `fit$comparison` -- model \| mse \| rmse, when `compare = TRUE`; - `fit$models` -- the underlying fitted model objects, for advanced use.