On the Design Based Inference for Continuous Spatial Populations

This paper deals with the estimation of the mean of a continuous spatial population. Under a design-based approach to inference, an estimator assisted by a penalized spline regression model recently proposed is further investigated by means of a comparison with its counterpart in a model based approach, known as block kriging. A simulation study is carried out to compare the performance of the new estimator with that of the block kriging predictor within a design based framework to inference