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Simple cases, where observations are complete, can be dealt with by using the sample covariance matrix. The sample covariance matrix (SCM) is an unbiased and efficient estimator of the covariance matrix if the space of covariance matrices is viewed as an extrinsic convex cone in R p×p; however, measured using the intrinsic geometry of positive ...
Throughout this article, boldfaced unsubscripted and are used to refer to random vectors, and Roman subscripted and are used to refer to scalar random variables.. If the entries in the column vector = (,, …,) are random variables, each with finite variance and expected value, then the covariance matrix is the matrix whose (,) entry is the covariance [1]: 177 ...
The sample covariance matrix has in the denominator rather than due to a variant of Bessel's correction: In short, the sample covariance relies on the difference between each observation and the sample mean, but the sample mean is slightly correlated with each observation since it is defined in terms of all observations.
The reason the sample covariance matrix has in the denominator rather than is essentially that the population mean is not known and is replaced by the sample mean ¯. If the population mean E ( X ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {E} (\mathbf {X} )} is known, the analogous unbiased estimate is given by
With any number of random variables in excess of 1, the variables can be stacked into a random vector whose i th element is the i th random variable. Then the variances and covariances can be placed in a covariance matrix, in which the (i, j) element is the covariance between the i th random variable and the j th one.
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.
The next expression states equivalently that the variance of the sum is the sum of the diagonal of covariance matrix plus two times the sum of its upper triangular elements (or its lower triangular elements); this emphasizes that the covariance matrix is symmetric. This formula is used in the theory of Cronbach's alpha in classical test theory.
The inverse of the variance matrix is called the "information matrix". Because the variance of the estimator of a parameter vector is a matrix, the problem of "minimizing the variance" is complicated. Using statistical theory, statisticians compress the information-matrix using real-valued summary statistics; being real-valued functions, these ...