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Firstly, if the true population mean is unknown, then the sample variance (which uses the sample mean in place of the true mean) is a biased estimator: it underestimates the variance by a factor of (n − 1) / n; correcting this factor, resulting in the sum of squared deviations about the sample mean divided by n-1 instead of n, is called ...
The median of a normal distribution with mean μ and variance σ 2 is μ. In fact, for a normal distribution, mean = median = mode. The median of a uniform distribution in the interval [a, b] is (a + b) / 2, which is also the mean. The median of a Cauchy distribution with location parameter x 0 and scale parameter y is x 0, the location parameter.
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 accompanying plot of skewness as a function of variance and mean shows that maximum variance (1/4) is coupled with zero skewness and the symmetry condition (μ = 1/2), and that maximum skewness (positive or negative infinity) occurs when the mean is located at one end or the other, so that the "mass" of the probability distribution is ...
It is also the continuous distribution with the maximum entropy for a specified mean and variance. [18] [19] Geary has shown, assuming that the mean and variance are finite, that the normal distribution is the only distribution where the mean and variance calculated from a set of independent draws are independent of each other. [20] [21]
Since the sample mean and variance are independent, and the sum of normally distributed variables is also normal, we get that: ^ + ˙ (+, + ()) Based on the above, standard confidence intervals for + can be constructed (using a Pivotal quantity) as: ^ + + And since confidence intervals are preserved for monotonic transformations, we get that
The median absolute deviation is a measure of statistical dispersion. Moreover, the MAD is a robust statistic , being more resilient to outliers in a data set than the standard deviation . In the standard deviation, the distances from the mean are squared, so large deviations are weighted more heavily, and thus outliers can heavily influence it.
The midpoint of the distribution, +, is both the mean and the median of the uniform distribution. Although both the sample mean and the sample median are unbiased estimators of the midpoint, neither is as efficient as the sample mid-range , i.e. the arithmetic mean of the sample maximum and the sample minimum, which is the UMVU estimator of the ...