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For normally distributed random variables inverse-variance weighted averages can also be derived as the maximum likelihood estimate for the true value. Furthermore, from a Bayesian perspective the posterior distribution for the true value given normally distributed observations and a flat prior is a normal distribution with the inverse-variance weighted average as a mean and variance ().
The weighted arithmetic mean is similar to an ordinary arithmetic mean (the most common type of average), except that instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others.
This method can also be used to create spatial weights matrices in spatial autocorrelation analyses (e.g. Moran's I). [1] The name given to this type of method was motivated by the weighted average applied, since it resorts to the inverse of the distance to each known point ("amount of proximity") when assigning weights.
Data can be binary, ordinal, or continuous variables. It works by normalizing the differences between each pair of variables and then computing a weighted average of these differences. The distance was defined in 1971 by Gower [1] and it takes values between 0 and 1 with smaller values indicating higher similarity.
One very early weighted estimator is the Horvitz–Thompson estimator of the mean. [3] When the sampling probability is known, from which the sampling population is drawn from the target population, then the inverse of this probability is used to weight the observations. This approach has been generalized to many aspects of statistics under ...
[2] [3] Their importance is partly due to the central limit theorem. It states that, under some conditions, the average of many samples (observations) of a random variable with finite mean and variance is itself a random variable—whose distribution converges to a normal distribution as the number of samples increases.
In this setting, Kish's design effect, for the increase in variance of the sample weighted mean due to this design (reflected in the weights), versus SRS of some outcome variable y (when there is no correlation between the weights and the outcome, i.e. haphazard weights) is: [1]: 427 [9]: 191(4.2)
Since the probabilities must satisfy p 1 + ⋅⋅⋅ + p k = 1, it is natural to interpret E[X] as a weighted average of the x i values, with weights given by their probabilities p i. In the special case that all possible outcomes are equiprobable (that is, p 1 = ⋅⋅⋅ = p k), the weighted average is given by the standard average. In the ...