Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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.
If the sampling distribution is normally distributed, the sample mean, the standard error, and the quantiles of the normal distribution can be used to calculate confidence intervals for the true population mean.
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 ...
However, the sample standard deviation is not unbiased for the population standard deviation – see unbiased estimation of standard deviation. Further, for other distributions the sample mean and sample variance are not in general MVUEs – for a uniform distribution with unknown upper and lower bounds, the mid-range is the MVUE for the ...
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.
It is remarkable that the sum of squares of the residuals and the sample mean can be shown to be independent of each other, using, e.g. Basu's theorem.That fact, and the normal and chi-squared distributions given above form the basis of calculations involving the t-statistic:
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 ...