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In probability theory and statistics, the index of dispersion, [1] dispersion index, coefficient of dispersion, relative variance, or variance-to-mean ratio (VMR), like the coefficient of variation, is a normalized measure of the dispersion of a probability distribution: it is a measure used to quantify whether a set of observed occurrences are clustered or dispersed compared to a standard ...
Algorithms for calculating variance play a major role in computational statistics.A key difficulty in the design of good algorithms for this problem is that formulas for the variance may involve sums of squares, which can lead to numerical instability as well as to arithmetic overflow when dealing with large values.
Firstly, if the true population mean is unknown, then the sample variance (which uses the sample mean in place of the true mean) is a biased estimator: it underestimates the variance by a factor of (n − 1) / n; correcting this factor, resulting in the sum of squared deviations about the sample mean divided by n-1 instead of n, is called ...
In statistics, dispersion (also called variability, scatter, or spread) is the extent to which a distribution is stretched or squeezed. [1] Common examples of measures of statistical dispersion are the variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. For instance, when the variance of data in a set is large, the data is widely scattered.
For any index, the closer to uniform the distribution, the larger the variance, and the larger the differences in frequencies across categories, the smaller the variance. Indices of qualitative variation are then analogous to information entropy , which is minimized when all cases belong to a single category and maximized in a uniform distribution.
A key step in the derivation of the binary power law by Hughes and Madden was the observation made by Patil and Stiteler [61] that the variance-to-mean ratio used for assessing over-dispersion of unbounded counts in a single sample is actually the ratio of two variances: the observed variance and the theoretical variance for a random ...
The ratio estimator is a statistical estimator for the ratio of means of two random variables. Ratio estimates are biased and corrections must be made when they are used in experimental or survey work. The ratio estimates are asymmetrical and symmetrical tests such as the t test should not be used to generate confidence intervals.
The variance/mean ratio method focuses mainly on determining whether a species fits a randomly spaced distribution, but can also be used as evidence for either an even or clumped distribution. [22] To utilize the Variance/Mean ratio method, data is collected from several random samples of a given population.