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A weight function is a mathematical device used when performing a sum, integral, or average to give some elements more "weight" or influence on the result than other elements in the same set. The result of this application of a weight function is a weighted sum or weighted average .
For the trivial case in which all the weights are equal to 1, the above formula is just like the regular formula for the variance of the mean (but notice that it uses the maximum likelihood estimator for the variance instead of the unbiased variance. I.e.: dividing it by n instead of (n-1)).
For normally distributed random variables inverse-variance weighted averages can also be derived as the maximum likelihood estimate for the true value. Furthermore, from a Bayesian perspective the posterior distribution for the true value given normally distributed observations and a flat prior is a normal distribution with the inverse-variance weighted average as a mean and variance ().
The second form above illustrates that the logarithm of the geometric mean is the weighted arithmetic mean of the logarithms of the individual values. If all the weights are equal, the weighted geometric mean simplifies to the ordinary unweighted geometric mean. [1]
This method can also be used to create spatial weights matrices in spatial autocorrelation analyses (e.g. Moran's I). [1] The name given to this type of method was motivated by the weighted average applied, since it resorts to the inverse of the distance to each known point ("amount of proximity") when assigning weights.
It is a measure used to evaluate the performance of regression or forecasting models. It is a variant of MAPE in which the mean absolute percent errors is treated as a weighted arithmetic mean. Most commonly the absolute percent errors are weighted by the actuals (e.g. in case of sales forecasting, errors are weighted by sales volume). [3]
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.
As regards weighting, one can either weight all of the measured ages equally, or weight them by the proportion of the sample that they represent. For example, if two thirds of the sample was used for the first measurement and one third for the second and final measurement, then one might weight the first measurement twice that of the second.