Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Firstly, while the sample variance (using Bessel's correction) is an unbiased estimator of the population variance, its square root, the sample standard deviation, is a biased estimate of the population standard deviation; because the square root is a concave function, the bias is downward, by Jensen's inequality.
One way of seeing that this is a biased estimator of the standard deviation of the population is to start from the result that s 2 is an unbiased estimator for the variance σ 2 of the underlying population if that variance exists and the sample values are drawn independently with replacement. The square root is a nonlinear function, and only ...
The theory of median-unbiased estimators was revived by George W. Brown in 1947: [8]. An estimate of a one-dimensional parameter θ will be said to be median-unbiased, if, for fixed θ, the median of the distribution of the estimate is at the value θ; i.e., the estimate underestimates just as often as it overestimates.
The unbiased estimation of standard deviation is a technically involved problem, though for the normal distribution using the term n − 1.5 yields an almost unbiased estimator. The unbiased sample variance is a U-statistic for the function ƒ(y 1, y 2) = (y 1 − y 2) 2 /2, meaning that it is obtained by averaging a 2-sample statistic over 2 ...
However, the sample standard deviation is not unbiased for the population standard deviation – see unbiased estimation of standard deviation. Further, for other distributions the sample mean and sample variance are not in general MVUEs – for a uniform distribution with unknown upper and lower bounds, the mid-range is the MVUE for the ...
Important examples include the sample variance and sample standard deviation. Without Bessel's correction (that is, when using the sample size instead of the degrees of freedom), these are both negatively biased but consistent estimators. With the correction, the corrected sample variance is unbiased, while the corrected sample standard ...
1.1 Proof. 2 Example for when ... is the uniformly minimum-variance unbiased estimator ... be a random sample from a distribution that has p.d.f (or p.m.f in the ...
Efficient estimators are always minimum variance unbiased estimators. However the converse is false: There exist point-estimation problems for which the minimum-variance mean-unbiased estimator is inefficient. [6] Historically, finite-sample efficiency was an early optimality criterion. However this criterion has some limitations: