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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.
Normally, however, only a subset is available, and the variance calculated from this is called the sample variance. The variance calculated from a sample is considered an estimate of the full population variance. There are multiple ways to calculate an estimate of the population variance, as discussed in the section below.
The sum of squared deviations needed to calculate sample variance (before deciding whether to divide by n or n − 1) is most easily calculated as = From the two derived expectations above the expected value of this sum is
which is an unbiased estimator of the variance of the mean in terms of the observed sample variance and known quantities. If the autocorrelations are identically zero, this expression reduces to the well-known result for the variance of the mean for independent data. The effect of the expectation operator in these expressions is that the ...
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 ...
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]
If the data points are normally distributed with mean 0 and variance , then the residual sum of squares has a scaled chi-squared distribution (scaled by the factor ), with n − 1 degrees of freedom. The degrees-of-freedom, here a parameter of the distribution, can still be interpreted as the dimension of an underlying vector subspace.
In statistics, pooled variance (also known as combined variance, composite variance, or overall variance, and written ) is a method for estimating variance of several different populations when the mean of each population may be different, but one may assume that the variance of each population is the same. The numerical estimate resulting from ...