Improving the Representativeness of a Simple Random Sample: An Optimization Model and Its Application to the Continuous Sample of Working Lives

This paper proposes an optimization model for selecting a larger subsample that improves the representativeness of a simple random sample previously obtained from a population larger than the population of interest. The problem formulation involves convex mixed-integer nonlinear programming (convex MINLP) and is, therefore, NP-hard. However, the solution is found by maximizing the size of the subsample taken from a stratified random sample with proportional allocation and restricting it to a p-value large enough to achieve a good fit to the population of interest using Pearson&rsquo