Abstract

Selection of an appropriate sample size is an important prerequisite to any statistical investigation. In this thesis the problem of identifying the sample size for testing the seed health by noting the presence or the absence of pathogen(s) is considered. The cross-classified data of variety by seed by pathogen is collected for the purpose, which consists of N observations for each variety of seed. Here N is regarded as population size and the outcome is a Bernoulli random variable. A simulation method for identifying the sample size is developed and is compared with five existing methods. The simulation method is based on chi-square ({2) measure of goodness of fit of empirical distribution with that of a theoretical distribution. Here k repeated samples for each of the sample sizes n=10(10)50(25)100(100)500, using a simple random sampling without replacement (SRSWOR), are considered. For each of the k samples of size n, the chi-square ({2) measure of goodness of fit is computed.