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An estimator or decision rule with zero bias is called unbiased. In statistics, "bias" is an objective property of an estimator. Bias is a distinct concept from consistency: consistent estimators converge in probability to the true value of the parameter, but may be biased or unbiased (see bias versus consistency for more).
In statistics and in particular statistical theory, unbiased estimation of a standard deviation is the calculation from a statistical sample of an estimated value of the standard deviation (a measure of statistical dispersion) of a population of values, in such a way that the expected value of the calculation equals the true value.
Detection bias occurs when a phenomenon is more likely to be observed for a particular set of study subjects. For instance, the syndemic involving obesity and diabetes may mean doctors are more likely to look for diabetes in obese patients than in thinner patients, leading to an inflation in diabetes among obese patients because of skewed detection efforts.
Bias is a property of the estimator, not of the estimate. Often, people refer to a "biased estimate" or an "unbiased estimate", but they really are talking about an "estimate from a biased estimator", or an "estimate from an unbiased estimator". Also, people often confuse the "error" of a single estimate with the "bias" of an estimator.
Efficiency in statistics is important because they allow one to compare the performance of various estimators. Although an unbiased estimator is usually favored over a biased one, a more efficient biased estimator can sometimes be more valuable than a less efficient unbiased estimator.
With the correction, the corrected sample variance is unbiased, while the corrected sample standard deviation is still biased, but less so, and both are still consistent: the correction factor converges to 1 as sample size grows. Here is another example. Let be a sequence of estimators for .
Under simple random sampling the bias is of the order O( n −1). An upper bound on the relative bias of the estimate is provided by the coefficient of variation (the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean). [2] Under simple random sampling the relative bias is O( n −1/2).
In statistics a minimum-variance unbiased estimator (MVUE) or uniformly minimum-variance unbiased estimator (UMVUE) is an unbiased estimator that has lower variance than any other unbiased estimator for all possible values of the parameter.