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In statistics and in particular statistical theory, unbiased estimation of a standard deviation is the calculation from a statistical sample of an estimated value of the standard deviation (a measure of statistical dispersion) of a population of values, in such a way that the expected value of the calculation equals the true value.
The "68–95–99.7 rule" is often used to quickly get a rough probability estimate of something, given its standard deviation, if the population is assumed to be normal. It is also used as a simple test for outliers if the population is assumed normal, and as a normality test if the population is potentially not normal.
When only a sample of data from a population is available, the term standard deviation of the sample or sample standard deviation can refer to either the above-mentioned quantity as applied to those data, or to a modified quantity that is an unbiased estimate of the population standard deviation (the standard deviation of the entire population).
Firstly, while the sample variance (using Bessel's correction) is an unbiased estimator of the population variance, its square root, the sample standard deviation, is a biased estimate of the population standard deviation; because the square root is a concave function, the bias is downward, by Jensen's inequality.
For a large sample from a normal distribution, 2.22Q n is approximately unbiased for the population standard deviation. For small or moderate samples, the expected value of Q n under a normal distribution depends markedly on the sample size, so finite-sample correction factors (obtained from a table or from simulations) are used to calibrate ...
For instance, if estimating the effect of a drug on blood pressure with a 95% confidence interval that is six units wide, and the known standard deviation of blood pressure in the population is 15, the required sample size would be =, which would be rounded up to 97, since sample sizes must be integers and must meet or exceed the calculated ...
The basis of the method is to have, or to find, a set of simultaneous equations involving both the sample data and the unknown model parameters which are to be solved in order to define the estimates of the parameters. [1] Various components of the equations are defined in terms of the set of observed data on which the estimates are to be based.
If one makes the parametric assumption that the underlying distribution is a normal distribution, and has a sample set {X 1, ..., X n}, then confidence intervals and credible intervals may be used to estimate the population mean μ and population standard deviation σ of the underlying population, while prediction intervals may be used to estimate the value of the next sample variable, X n+1.