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In statistics and in particular statistical theory, unbiased estimation of a standard deviation is the calculation from a statistical sample of an estimated value of the standard deviation (a measure of statistical dispersion) of a population of values, in such a way that the expected value of the calculation equals the true value.
The mean and the standard deviation of a set of data are descriptive statistics usually reported together. In a certain sense, the standard deviation is a "natural" measure of statistical dispersion if the center of the data is measured about the mean. This is because the standard deviation from the mean is smaller than from any other point.
This correction is so common that the term "sample variance" and "sample standard deviation" are frequently used to mean the corrected estimators (unbiased sample variation, less biased sample standard deviation), using n − 1. However caution is needed: some calculators and software packages may provide for both or only the more unusual ...
In the formula for the predictive confidence interval no mention is made of the unobservable parameters μ and σ of population mean and standard deviation – the observed sample statistics ¯ and of sample mean and standard deviation are used, and what is estimated is the outcome of future samples.
A simple Monte Carlo spreadsheet calculation would reveal typical values for the standard deviation (around 105 to 115% of σ). Or, one could subtract the mean of each triplet from the values, and examine the distribution of 300 values. The mean is identically zero, but the standard deviation should be somewhat smaller (around 75 to 85% of σ).
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 second standard deviation from the mean in a normal distribution encompasses a larger portion of the data, covering approximately 95% of the observations. Standard deviation is a widely used measure of the spread or dispersion of a dataset. It quantifies the average amount of variation or deviation of individual data points from the mean of ...
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.