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Algorithms for calculating variance play a major role in computational statistics.A key difficulty in the design of good algorithms for this problem is that formulas for the variance may involve sums of squares, which can lead to numerical instability as well as to arithmetic overflow when dealing with large values.
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.
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
Carl Friedrich Gauss, for example, once defined the standard normal as =, which has a variance of , and Stephen Stigler [9] once defined the standard normal as =, which has a simple functional form and a variance of =.
Since the square root is a strictly concave function, it follows from Jensen's inequality that the square root of the sample variance is an underestimate. The use of n − 1 instead of n in the formula for the sample variance is known as Bessel's correction , which corrects the bias in the estimation of the population variance, and some, but ...
It is usually determined on the basis of the cost, time or convenience of data collection and the need for sufficient statistical power. For example, if a proportion is being estimated, one may wish to have the 95% confidence interval be less than 0.06 units wide. Alternatively, sample size may be assessed based on the power of a hypothesis ...
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.
When a member of the exponential family has been specified, the variance function can easily be derived. [4]: 29 The general form of the variance function is presented under the exponential family context, as well as specific forms for Normal, Bernoulli, Poisson, and Gamma. In addition, we describe the applications and use of variance functions ...