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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.
The sample mean and sample covariance are not robust statistics, meaning that they are sensitive to outliers. As robustness is often a desired trait, particularly in real-world applications, robust alternatives may prove desirable, notably quantile -based statistics such as the sample median for location, [ 4 ] and interquartile range (IQR) for ...
For example, if the variance is to be estimated from a random sample of independent scores, then the degrees of freedom is equal to the number of independent scores (N) minus the number of parameters estimated as intermediate steps (one, namely, the sample mean) and is therefore equal to . [2]
(The sample mean need not be a consistent estimator for any population mean, because no mean needs to exist for a heavy-tailed distribution.) A well-defined and robust statistic for the central tendency is the sample median, which is consistent and median-unbiased for the population median.
In statistics, a sampling distribution or finite-sample distribution is the probability distribution of a given random-sample-based statistic.If an arbitrarily large number of samples, each involving multiple observations (data points), were separately used to compute one value of a statistic (such as, for example, the sample mean or sample variance) for each sample, then the sampling ...
The sampling distribution of a mean is generated by repeated sampling from the same population and recording the sample mean per sample. 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 ...
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.