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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.
This forms a distribution of different means, and this distribution has its own mean and variance. Mathematically, the variance of the sampling mean distribution obtained is equal to the variance of the population divided by the sample size. This is because as the sample size increases, sample means cluster more closely around the population mean.
The theory of median-unbiased estimators was revived by George W. Brown in 1947: [8]. An estimate of a one-dimensional parameter θ will be said to be median-unbiased, if, for fixed θ, the median of the distribution of the estimate is at the value θ; i.e., the estimate underestimates just as often as it overestimates.
For a normal distribution with unknown mean and variance, the sample mean and (unbiased) sample variance are the MVUEs for the population mean and population variance. However, the sample standard deviation is not unbiased for the population standard deviation – see unbiased estimation of standard deviation.
For example, a single observation is itself an unbiased estimate of the mean and a pair of observations can be used to derive an unbiased estimate of the variance. The U-statistic based on this estimator is defined as the average (across all combinatorial selections of the given size from the full set of observations) of the basic estimator ...
Robust measures of scale can be used as estimators of properties of the population, either for parameter estimation or as estimators of their own expected value.. For example, robust estimators of scale are used to estimate the population standard deviation, generally by multiplying by a scale factor to make it an unbiased consistent estimator; see scale parameter: estimation.
The optimal value depends on excess kurtosis, as discussed in mean squared error: variance; for the normal distribution this is optimized by dividing by n + 1 (instead of n − 1 or n). Thirdly, Bessel's correction is only necessary when the population mean is unknown, and one is estimating both population mean and population variance from a ...
Students of statistics and probability theory sometimes develop misconceptions about the normal distribution, ideas that may seem plausible but are mathematically untrue. For example, it is sometimes mistakenly thought that two linearly uncorrelated , normally distributed random variables must be statistically independent .