Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Since the square root introduces bias, the terminology "uncorrected" and "corrected" is preferred for the standard deviation estimators: s n is the uncorrected sample standard deviation (i.e., without Bessel's correction) s is the corrected sample standard deviation (i.e., with Bessel's correction), which is less biased, but still biased
The use of n − 1 instead of n in the formula for the sample variance is known as Bessel's correction, which corrects the bias in the estimation of the population variance, and some, but not all of the bias in the estimation of the population standard deviation.
When only a sample of data from a population is available, the term standard deviation of the sample or sample standard deviation can refer to either the above-mentioned quantity as applied to those data, or to a modified quantity that is an unbiased estimate of the population standard deviation (the standard deviation of the entire population).
The sum of the residuals (unlike the sum of the errors) is necessarily 0. If one knows the values of any n − 1 of the residuals, one can thus find the last one. That means they are constrained to lie in a space of dimension n − 1. One says that there are n − 1 degrees of freedom for errors.
The use of the term n − 1 is called Bessel's correction, and it is also used in sample covariance and the sample standard deviation (the square root of variance). The square root is a concave function and thus introduces negative bias (by Jensen's inequality ), which depends on the distribution, and thus the corrected sample standard ...
Since this is a biased estimate of the variance of the unobserved errors, the bias is removed by dividing the sum of the squared residuals by df = n − p − 1, instead of n, where df is the number of degrees of freedom (n minus the number of parameters (excluding the intercept) p being estimated - 1). This forms an unbiased estimate of the ...
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.
If one makes the parametric assumption that the underlying distribution is a normal distribution, and has a sample set {X 1, ..., X n}, then confidence intervals and credible intervals may be used to estimate the population mean μ and population standard deviation σ of the underlying population, while prediction intervals may be used to estimate the value of the next sample variable, X n+1.