Simultaneous inspection of variable equivalence for finite populations

In this paper, we study the problem of simultaneously inspecting n finite normal populations for variable equivalence with respect to a control. Our goal is to select all equivalent populations and to exclude all nonequivalences. By incorporating information from the samples taken from each of the n populations, an empirical Bayes simultaneous inspection procedure δ∼* is constructed. The relative regret of δ∼* is used as a measure of performance of δ∼*. It is proved that δ∼* is asymptotically optimal in the sense that the relative regret of δ∼* converges to zero at a rate n-1((lnn)(lnlnn))2.5.