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One very early weighted estimator is the Horvitz–Thompson estimator of the mean. [3] When the sampling probability is known, from which the sampling population is drawn from the target population, then the inverse of this probability is used to weight the observations. This approach has been generalized to many aspects of statistics under ...
In statistics, the Horvitz–Thompson estimator, named after Daniel G. Horvitz and Donovan J. Thompson, [1] is a method for estimating the total [2] and mean of a pseudo-population in a stratified sample by applying inverse probability weighting to account for the difference in the sampling distribution between the collected data and the target population.
However, the simulation outputs are weighted to correct for the use of the biased distribution, and this ensures that the new importance sampling estimator is unbiased. The weight is given by the likelihood ratio, that is, the Radon–Nikodym derivative of the true underlying distribution with respect to the biased simulation distribution.
When treating the weights as constants, and having a sample of n observations from uncorrelated random variables, all with the same variance and expectation (as is the case for i.i.d random variables), then the variance of the weighted mean can be estimated as the multiplication of the unweighted variance by Kish's design effect (see proof):
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 ().
This implies that in a weighted sum of variables, the variable with the largest weight will have a disproportionally large weight in the variance of the total. For example, if X and Y are uncorrelated and the weight of X is two times the weight of Y, then the weight of the variance of X will be four times the weight of the variance of Y.
A visual representation of the sampling process. In statistics, quality assurance, and survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset or a statistical sample (termed sample for short) of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. The subset is meant to reflect the whole ...
In this setting, Kish's design effect, for the increase in variance of the sample weighted mean due to this design (reflected in the weights), versus SRS of some outcome variable y (when there is no correlation between the weights and the outcome, i.e. haphazard weights) is: [1]: 427 [9]: 191(4.2)