Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
As explained above, while s 2 is an unbiased estimator for the population variance, s is still a biased estimator for the population standard deviation, though markedly less biased than the uncorrected sample standard deviation. This estimator is commonly used and generally known simply as the "sample standard deviation".
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.
A disadvantage of the variance for practical applications is that, unlike the standard deviation, its units differ from the random variable, which is why the standard deviation is more commonly reported as a measure of dispersion once the calculation is finished. Another disadvantage is that the variance is not finite for many distributions.
One way of seeing that this is a biased estimator of the standard deviation of the population is to start from the result that s 2 is an unbiased estimator for the variance σ 2 of the underlying population if that variance exists and the sample values are drawn independently with replacement. The square root is a nonlinear function, and only ...
For correlated random variables the sample variance needs to be computed ... whereas the standard deviation of the sample is the degree to which ...
The reason that an uncorrected sample variance, S 2, is biased stems from the fact that the sample mean is an ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator for μ: ¯ is the number that makes the sum = (¯) as small as possible. That is, when any other number is plugged into this sum, the sum can only increase.
Variance (the square of the standard deviation) – location-invariant but not linear in scale. Variance-to-mean ratio – mostly used for count data when the term coefficient of dispersion is used and when this ratio is dimensionless, as count data are themselves dimensionless, not otherwise. Some measures of dispersion have specialized purposes.
A conventional choice is to add noise with a standard deviation of / for a sample size n; this noise is often drawn from a Student-t distribution with n-1 degrees of freedom. [47] This results in an approximately-unbiased estimator for the variance of the sample mean. [48]