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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 ...
The problem is that in estimating the sample mean, the process has already made our estimate of the mean close to the value we sampled—identical, for n = 1. In the case of n = 1, the variance just cannot be estimated, because there is no variability in the sample. But consider n = 2. Suppose the sample were (0, 2).
The use of the term n − 1 is called Bessel's correction, and it is also used in sample covariance and the sample standard deviation (the square root of variance). The square root is a concave function and thus introduces negative bias (by Jensen's inequality ), which depends on the distribution, and thus the corrected sample standard ...
Here taking the square root introduces further downward bias, by Jensen's inequality, due to the square root's being a concave function. The bias in the variance is easily corrected, but the bias from the square root is more difficult to correct, and depends on the distribution in question.
The sampling distribution of a mean is generated by repeated sampling from the same population and recording the sample mean per sample. This forms a distribution of different means, and this distribution has its own mean and variance .
Square root biased sampling is a sampling method proposed by William H. Press, a computer scientist and computational biologist, for use in airport screenings. It is the mathematically optimal compromise between simple random sampling and strong profiling that most quickly finds a rare malfeasor, given fixed screening resources. [1] [2]
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.
Throughout this article, boldfaced unsubscripted and are used to refer to random vectors, and Roman subscripted and are used to refer to scalar random variables.. If the entries in the column vector = (,, …,) are random variables, each with finite variance and expected value, then the covariance matrix is the matrix whose (,) entry is the covariance [1]: 177 ...