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Throughout this article, boldfaced unsubscripted and are used to refer to random vectors, and Roman subscripted and are used to refer to scalar random variables.. If the entries in the column vector = (,, …,) are random variables, each with finite variance and expected value, then the covariance matrix is the matrix whose (,) entry is the covariance [1]: 177 ...
The sample covariance matrix (SCM) is an unbiased and efficient estimator of the covariance matrix if the space of covariance matrices is viewed as an extrinsic convex cone in R p×p; however, measured using the intrinsic geometry of positive-definite matrices, the SCM is a biased and inefficient estimator. [1]
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.
With any number of random variables in excess of 1, the variables can be stacked into a random vector whose i th element is the i th random variable. Then the variances and covariances can be placed in a covariance matrix, in which the (i, j) element is the covariance between the i th random variable and the j th one.
Another generalization of variance for vector-valued random variables , which results in a scalar value rather than in a matrix, is the generalized variance (), the determinant of the covariance matrix. The generalized variance can be shown to be related to the multidimensional scatter of points around their mean.
The Wishart distribution arises as the distribution of the sample covariance matrix for a sample from a multivariate normal distribution. It occurs frequently in likelihood-ratio tests in multivariate statistical analysis. It also arises in the spectral theory of random matrices [citation needed] and in multidimensional Bayesian analysis. [5]
The inverse of the variance matrix is called the "information matrix". Because the variance of the estimator of a parameter vector is a matrix, the problem of "minimizing the variance" is complicated. Using statistical theory, statisticians compress the information-matrix using real-valued summary statistics; being real-valued functions, these ...
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.