Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Creative Components Dissertations Spring 2019 A Computationally Efficient Method for Selecting a Split Questionnaire Design Matthew Stuart Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/creativecomponents Part of the Social Statistics Commons Recommended Citation Stuart, Matthew, "A Computationally Efficient Method for Selecting a Split Questionnaire Design" (2019). Creative Components. 252. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/creativecomponents/252 This Creative Component is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Creative Components by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A Computationally Efficient Method for Selecting a Split Questionnaire Design Matthew Stuart1, Cindy Yu1,∗ Department of Statistics Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011 Abstract Split questionnaire design (SQD) is a relatively new survey tool to reduce response burden and increase the quality of responses. Among a set of possible SQD choices, a design is considered as the best if it leads to the least amount of information loss quantified by the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) distance. However, the calculation of the KLD distance requires computation of the distribution function for the observed data after integrating out all the missing variables in a particular SQD. For a typical survey questionnaire with a large number of categorical variables, this computation can become practically infeasible. Motivated by the Horvitz-Thompson estima- tor, we propose an approach to approximate the distribution function of the observed in much reduced computation time and lose little valuable information when comparing different choices of SQDs.