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Given a sample from a normal distribution, whose parameters are unknown, it is possible to give prediction intervals in the frequentist sense, i.e., an interval [a, b] based on statistics of the sample such that on repeated experiments, X n+1 falls in the interval the desired percentage of the time; one may call these "predictive confidence intervals".
In statistics, interval estimation is the use of sample data to estimate an interval of possible values of a parameter of interest. This is in contrast to point estimation, which gives a single value. [1] The most prevalent forms of interval estimation are confidence intervals (a frequentist method) and credible intervals (a Bayesian method). [2]
A simple example arises where the quantity to be estimated is the population mean, in which case a natural estimate is the sample mean. Similarly, the sample variance can be used to estimate the population variance. A confidence interval for the true mean can be constructed centered on the sample mean with a width which is a multiple of the ...
This algorithm can easily be adapted to compute the variance of a finite population: simply divide by n instead of n − 1 on the last line.. Because SumSq and (Sum×Sum)/n can be very similar numbers, cancellation can lead to the precision of the result to be much less than the inherent precision of the floating-point arithmetic used to perform the computation.
This forms a distribution of different means, and this distribution has its own mean and variance. Mathematically, the variance of the sampling mean distribution obtained is equal to the variance of the population divided by the sample size. This is because as the sample size increases, sample means cluster more closely around the population mean.
In statistics, an estimator is a rule for calculating an estimate of a given quantity based on observed data: thus the rule (the estimator), the quantity of interest (the estimand) and its result (the estimate) are distinguished. [1] For example, the sample mean is a commonly used estimator of the population mean. There are point and interval ...
which is an unbiased estimator of the variance of the mean in terms of the observed sample variance and known quantities. If the autocorrelations are identically zero, this expression reduces to the well-known result for the variance of the mean for independent data. The effect of the expectation operator in these expressions is that the ...
Normally, however, only a subset is available, and the variance calculated from this is called the sample variance. The variance calculated from a sample is considered an estimate of the full population variance. There are multiple ways to calculate an estimate of the population variance, as discussed in the section below.