Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In statistics, the method of moments is a method of estimation of population parameters.The same principle is used to derive higher moments like skewness and kurtosis. It starts by expressing the population moments (i.e., the expected values of powers of the random variable under consideration) as functions of the parameters of interest.
In statistical inference, parameters are sometimes taken to be unobservable, and in this case the statistician's task is to estimate or infer what they can about the parameter based on a random sample of observations taken from the full population. Estimators of a set of parameters of a specific distribution are often measured for a population ...
Estimation theory is a branch of statistics that deals with estimating the values of parameters based on measured empirical data that has a random component. The parameters describe an underlying physical setting in such a way that their value affects the distribution of the measured data.
A consistent estimator is an estimator whose sequence of estimates converge in probability to the quantity being estimated as the index (usually the sample size) grows without bound. In other words, increasing the sample size increases the probability of the estimator being close to the population parameter.
The bootstrap distribution of a parameter-estimator is often used to calculate confidence intervals for its population-parameter. [2] A variety of methods for constructing the confidence intervals have been proposed, although there is disagreement which method is the best.
The table shown on the right can be used in a two-sample t-test to estimate the sample sizes of an experimental group and a control group that are of equal size, that is, the total number of individuals in the trial is twice that of the number given, and the desired significance level is 0.05. [4] The parameters used are:
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.
A simple example arises where the quantity to be estimated is the population mean, in which case a natural estimate is the sample mean. Similarly, the sample variance can be used to estimate the population variance. A confidence interval for the true mean can be constructed centered on the sample mean with a width which is a multiple of the ...