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Algorithms for calculating variance play a major role in computational statistics.A key difficulty in the design of good algorithms for this problem is that formulas for the variance may involve sums of squares, which can lead to numerical instability as well as to arithmetic overflow when dealing with large values.
The weighted mean in this case is: ¯ = ¯ (=), (where the order of the matrix–vector product is not commutative), in terms of the covariance of the weighted mean: ¯ = (=), For example, consider the weighted mean of the point [1 0] with high variance in the second component and [0 1] with high variance in the first component.
If the experimental errors, , are uncorrelated, have a mean of zero and a constant variance, , the Gauss–Markov theorem states that the least-squares estimator, ^, has the minimum variance of all estimators that are linear combinations of the observations. In this sense it is the best, or optimal, estimator of the parameters.
The idea of the kernel average smoother is the following. For each data point X 0, choose a constant distance size λ (kernel radius, or window width for p = 1 dimension), and compute a weighted average for all data points that are closer than to X 0 (the closer to X 0 points get higher weights).
The result of this application of a weight function is a weighted sum or weighted average. Weight functions occur frequently in statistics and analysis, and are closely related to the concept of a measure. Weight functions can be employed in both discrete and continuous settings.
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 ().
WPGMA (Weighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean) is a simple agglomerative (bottom-up) hierarchical clustering method, generally attributed to Sokal and Michener. [ 1 ] The WPGMA method is similar to its unweighted variant, the UPGMA method.
In data analysis based on the Rasch model, the reduced chi-squared statistic is called the outfit mean-square statistic, and the information-weighted reduced chi-squared statistic is called the infit mean-square statistic. [21]