TY - BOOK AU - Ávila Valdez, José Luis, AU - Leiva Sánchez,Víctor E. AU - Riquelme,Marco ED - Universidad de Valparaíso (Chile). TI - Usingthe EM algorithm in small area estimation whith the Fay-Herriot model PY - 2017/// CY - Valparaíso PB - Universidad de Valparaíso KW - ALGORITMOS KW - ALGORITMOS DE EXPECTACION - MAXIMIZACION KW - MAXIMOS Y MINIMOS N1 - CONICYT - PCHA/Doctorado Nacional/2014-63140019; Doctorado en Estadística N2 - Standard methods of variance component estimation used in the Fay-Herriot model for small area estimation can produce inadmissible (negative or zero) values of these variances. This implies that the empirical best linear unbiased predictor of a small area mean does not take into account the variance of the random effect of small areas, reducing it only to a regression estimator. In this work, we consider an approach based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to solve this problem of inadmissibility in both univariate and multivariate Fay-Herriot model. We show through Monte Carlo simulations that the EM algorithm always produces strictly positive model variance component estimates. In the univariate case, we compare the performance of the proposed approach for two recent methods in terms of relative bias, mean square error and mean square predictor error. We apply our approach to a food security and poverty data set collected in Mexico ER -