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The arithmetic mean (or simply mean or average) of a list of numbers, is the sum of all of the numbers divided by their count.Similarly, the mean of a sample ,, …,, usually denoted by ¯, is the sum of the sampled values divided by the number of items in the sample.
The sample covariance matrix has in the denominator rather than due to a variant of Bessel's correction: In short, the sample covariance relies on the difference between each observation and the sample mean, but the sample mean is slightly correlated with each observation since it is defined in terms of all observations.
In addition to mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean is frequently used in economics, anthropology, history, and almost every academic field to some extent. For example, per capita income is the arithmetic average income of a nation's population.
In such settings, the sample mean is considered to meet the desirable criterion for a "good" estimator in being unbiased; that is, the expected value of the estimate is equal to the true value of the underlying parameter.
For example, one may administer a test to a number of individuals. If it is assumed that each person's score (0 ≤ θ ≤ 1) is drawn from a population-level beta distribution, then an important statistic is the mean of this population-level distribution. The mean and sample size parameters are related to the shape parameters α and β via [3]
This approximate formula is for moderate to large sample sizes; the reference gives the exact formulas for any sample size, and can be applied to heavily autocorrelated time series like Wall Street stock quotes.
Pearson's correlation coefficient is the covariance of the two variables divided by the product of their standard deviations. The form of the definition involves a "product moment", that is, the mean (the first moment about the origin) of the product of the mean-adjusted random variables; hence the modifier product-moment in the name.
The arithmetic mean of a series of values ,, …, is often denoted by placing an "overbar" over the symbol, e.g. ¯, pronounced "bar". Some commonly used symbols for sample statistics are given below: the sample mean ¯,