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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.
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 ...
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.
If the set is a sample from the whole population, then the unbiased sample variance can be calculated as 1017.538 that is the sum of the squared deviations about the mean of the sample, divided by 11 instead of 12. A function VAR.S in Microsoft Excel gives the unbiased sample variance while VAR.P is for population variance.
When only a sample of data from a population is available, the term standard deviation of the sample or sample standard deviation can refer to either the above-mentioned quantity as applied to those data, or to a modified quantity that is an unbiased estimate of the population standard deviation (the standard deviation of the entire population).
Given an r-sample statistic, one can create an n-sample statistic by something similar to bootstrapping (taking the average of the statistic over all subsamples of size r). This procedure is known to have certain good properties and the result is a U-statistic. The sample mean and sample variance are of this form, for r = 1 and r = 2.
Fay's method is a generalization of BRR. Instead of simply taking half-size samples, we use the full sample every time but with unequal weighting: k for units outside the half-sample and 2 − k for units inside it. (BRR is the case k = 0.) The variance estimate is then V/(1 − k) 2, where V is the estimate given by the BRR formula above.
Any non-linear differentiable function, (,), of two variables, and , can be expanded as + +. If we take the variance on both sides and use the formula [11] for the variance of a linear combination of variables (+) = + + (,), then we obtain | | + | | +, where is the standard deviation of the function , is the standard deviation of , is the standard deviation of and = is the ...