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In statistics, the bias of an estimator (or bias function) is the difference between this estimator's expected value and the true value of the parameter being estimated. An estimator or decision rule with zero bias is called unbiased. In statistics, "bias" is an objective property of an estimator.
Although an unbiased estimator is theoretically preferable to a biased estimator, in practice, biased estimators with small biases are frequently used. A biased estimator may be more useful for several reasons. First, an unbiased estimator may not exist without further assumptions. Second, sometimes an unbiased estimator is hard to compute.
For example, exactly identified models produce finite sample estimators with no moments, so the estimator can be said to be neither biased nor unbiased, the nominal size of test statistics may be substantially distorted, and the estimates may commonly be far away from the true value of the parameter.
We say that the estimator is a finite-sample efficient estimator (in the class of unbiased estimators) if it reaches the lower bound in the Cramér–Rao inequality above, for all θ ∈ Θ. Efficient estimators are always minimum variance unbiased estimators. However the converse is false: There exist point-estimation problems for which the ...
Bias: The bootstrap distribution and the sample may disagree systematically, in which case bias may occur. If the bootstrap distribution of an estimator is symmetric, then percentile confidence-interval are often used; such intervals are appropriate especially for median-unbiased estimators of minimum risk (with respect to an absolute loss ...
When the sampling design isn’t set in advance and needs to be figured out from the data we have, this can lead to an increase of both the variance and bias of the weighted estimator. This might happen when making adjustments for issues like non-coverage, non-response, or an unexpected strata split of the population that wasn’t available ...
Correction factor versus sample size n.. When the random variable is normally distributed, a minor correction exists to eliminate the bias.To derive the correction, note that for normally distributed X, Cochran's theorem implies that () / has a chi square distribution with degrees of freedom and thus its square root, / has a chi distribution with degrees of freedom.
Under simple random sampling the bias is of the order O( n −1). An upper bound on the relative bias of the estimate is provided by the coefficient of variation (the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean). [2] Under simple random sampling the relative bias is O( n −1/2).