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Typically when a mean is calculated it is important to know the variance and standard deviation about that mean. When a weighted mean is used, the variance of the weighted sample is different from the variance of the unweighted sample. The biased weighted sample variance ^ is defined similarly to the normal biased sample variance ^:
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.
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).
Since the square root introduces bias, the terminology "uncorrected" and "corrected" is preferred for the standard deviation estimators: s n is the uncorrected sample standard deviation (i.e., without Bessel's correction) s is the corrected sample standard deviation (i.e., with Bessel's correction), which is less biased, but still biased
Bias in standard deviation for autocorrelated data. The figure shows the ratio of the estimated standard deviation to its known value (which can be calculated analytically for this digital filter), for several settings of α as a function of sample size n. Changing α alters the variance reduction ratio of the filter, which is known to be
While other control charts treat rational subgroups of samples individually, the EWMA chart tracks the exponentially-weighted moving average of all prior sample means. EWMA weights samples in geometrically decreasing order so that the most recent samples are weighted most highly while the most distant samples contribute very little. [2]: 406
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.
The standard deviation is the square root of the variance. When individual determinations of an age are not of equal significance, it is better to use a weighted mean to obtain an "average" age, as follows: ¯ = = =.