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However, the sample standard deviation is not unbiased for the population standard deviation – see unbiased estimation of standard deviation. Further, for other distributions the sample mean and sample variance are not in general MVUEs – for a uniform distribution with unknown upper and lower bounds, the mid-range is the MVUE for the ...
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 ...
The sample mean, on the other hand, is an unbiased [5] estimator of the population mean μ. [3] Note that the usual definition of sample variance is = = (¯), and this is an unbiased estimator of the population variance.
For example, a single observation is itself an unbiased estimate of the mean and a pair of observations can be used to derive an unbiased estimate of the variance. The U-statistic based on this estimator is defined as the average (across all combinatorial selections of the given size from the full set of observations) of the basic estimator ...
Efficient estimators are always minimum variance unbiased estimators. However the converse is false: There exist point-estimation problems for which the minimum-variance mean-unbiased estimator is inefficient. [6] Historically, finite-sample efficiency was an early optimality criterion. However this criterion has some limitations:
For example, for a continuous uniform distribution with unknown maximum and minimum, the mid-range is the uniformly minimum-variance unbiased estimator (UMVU) estimator for the mean. The sample maximum and sample minimum, together with sample size, are a sufficient statistic for the population maximum and minimum – the distribution of other ...
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.
Additionally, unbiased estimators with smaller variances are preferred over larger variances because it will be closer to the "true" value of the parameter. The unbiased estimator with the smallest variance is known as the minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE).