Calibrated Edgeworth expansions of finite population L-statistics

ABSTRACT A short Edgeworth expansion is approximated for the distribution function of a Studentized linear combination of order statistics computed on a random sample drawn without replacement from a finite population, and using auxiliary data available for the population units. Simulations show an improvement over the usual Gaussian approximation and previous empirical Edgeworth expansions. Naive synthetic estimates of the distribution function, based on the auxiliary data only, yield accurate results when the auxiliary variable is well correlated with the study variable.