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In statistics, the variance function is a smooth function that depicts the variance of a random quantity as a function of its mean.The variance function is a measure of heteroscedasticity and plays a large role in many settings of statistical modelling.
The probability function, mean and variance are given in the adjacent table. An alternative expression of the distribution has both the number of balls taken of each color and the number of balls not taken as random variables, whereby the expression for the probability becomes symmetric.
In probability theory, it is possible to approximate the moments of a function f of a random variable X using Taylor expansions, provided that f is sufficiently differentiable and that the moments of X are finite.
Example: Given the mean and variance (as well as all further cumulants equal 0) the normal distribution is the distribution solving the moment problem. In mathematics , a moment problem arises as the result of trying to invert the mapping that takes a measure μ {\displaystyle \mu } to the sequence of moments
It is also the continuous distribution with the maximum entropy for a specified mean and variance. [18] [19] Geary has shown, assuming that the mean and variance are finite, that the normal distribution is the only distribution where the mean and variance calculated from a set of independent draws are independent of each other. [20] [21]
An example application of the method of moments is to estimate polynomial probability density distributions. In this case, an approximating polynomial of order is defined on an interval [,]. The method of moments then yields a system of equations, whose solution involves the inversion of a Hankel matrix. [2]
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.
Because of the reciprocity of estimator-variance and Fisher information, minimizing the variance corresponds to maximizing the information. When the linear (or linearized) statistical model has several parameters, the mean of the parameter estimator is a vector and its variance is a matrix. The inverse of the variance matrix is called the ...