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The arithmetic mean of a population, or population mean, is often denoted μ. [2] The sample mean ¯ (the arithmetic mean of a sample of values drawn from the population) makes a good estimator of the population mean, as its expected value is equal to the population mean (that is, it is an unbiased estimator).
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 ...
Also, the characteristic function of the sample mean X of n independent observations has characteristic function φ X (t) = (e −|t|/n) n = e −|t|, using the result from the previous section. This is the characteristic function of the standard Cauchy distribution: thus, the sample mean has the same distribution as the population itself.
More generally, in measure theory and probability theory, either sort of mean plays an important role. In this context, Jensen's inequality places sharp estimates on the relationship between these two different notions of the mean of a function. There is also a harmonic average of functions and a quadratic average (or root mean square) of ...
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.
Thus the mean difference between the groups does not depend on whether we organize the data as pairs. Although the mean difference is the same for the paired and unpaired statistics, their statistical significance levels can be very different, because it is easy to overstate the variance of the unpaired statistic.
For example, the parameter (the expectation) can be estimated by the mean of the data and the parameter (the variance) can be estimated from the standard deviation of the data. The mean is found as = /, where is the data value and the number of data, while the standard deviation is calculated as = (). With these parameters many distributions, e ...
In mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean (/ ˌ æ r ɪ θ ˈ m ɛ t ɪ k / arr-ith-MET-ik), arithmetic average, or just the mean or average (when the context is clear) is the sum of a collection of numbers divided by the count of numbers in the collection. [1] The collection is often a set of results from an experiment, an ...