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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.
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 ...
Given a sample from a normal distribution, whose parameters are unknown, it is possible to give prediction intervals in the frequentist sense, i.e., an interval [a, b] based on statistics of the sample such that on repeated experiments, X n+1 falls in the interval the desired percentage of the time; one may call these "predictive confidence intervals".
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
Given an r-sample statistic, one can create an n-sample statistic by something similar to bootstrapping (taking the average of the statistic over all subsamples of size r). This procedure is known to have certain good properties and the result is a U-statistic. The sample mean and sample variance are of this form, for r = 1 and r = 2.
In estimating the population variance from a sample when the population mean is unknown, the uncorrected sample variance is the mean of the squares of deviations of sample values from the sample mean (i.e., using a multiplicative factor 1/n). In this case, the sample variance is a biased estimator of the population variance. Multiplying the ...
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 ...