Variance and standard deviation
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Variance of a population
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Sample variance
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Review and intuition why we divide by n-1 for the unbiased sample variance
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Simulation showing bias in sample variance
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Unbiased Estimate of Population Variance
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Another simulation giving evidence that (n-1) gives us an unbiased estimate of variance
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Simulation providing evidence that (n-1) gives us unbiased estimate
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Will it converge towards -1?
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Variance
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Statistics: Standard Deviation
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Exploring Standard Deviation 1 Module
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Exploring standard deviation 1
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Standard deviation
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Statistics: Alternate Variance Formulas
Review and intuition why we divide by n-1 for the unbiased sample variance Reviewing the population mean, sample mean, population variance, sample variance and building an intuition for why we divide by n-1 for the unbiased sample variance
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- What I want to do in this video is review much of what we've already talked about.
- And the hopefully build the intuition on why we divide by n-1
- if we want to have an unbiased estimate of the population variance
- when we're calculating the sample variance.
- So let's think about a population.
- So let's say this is the population right over here.
- And it is of size capital N.
- And we also have a sample of that population.
- And it's size is lower case n data points.
- So let's talk about all the parameters and statistics
- we know about so far.
- So the first is the idea of the mean.
- So if we're trying to calculate the mean for the population.
- Is that going to be a parameter or a statistic?
- Well, when we're trying to calculate it on the population
- we are calculating a parameter.
- So let me right this down
- So this is going to be, for the population
- It is a parameter.
- And when we calculate, when we attempt to calculate something for a sample
- we would call that a statistic.
- So how do we think about the mean for a population?
- Well, first of all, we denote it with the greek
- letter miu.
- And we essentially take every data point in our population.
- So we take the sum of every data point.
- We start at the first data point
- and we go all the way to the capital Nth data point.
- For every data point we add up.
- So this is the ith data point:
- so x sub 1 plus x sub 2 all the way to x sub capital N.
- And then we divide by the total number of data points we have.
- Well how do we calculate the sample mean.
- Well for the sample mean we do a very similar thing but for the sample.
- We denote it with an X with a bar over it.
- And that's going to be taking every data point in the sample
- so going up to lower case n
- adding them up
- the sum of all the data points in our sample
- then dividing by the number of data points that we actually had.
- The other thing that we're trying to calculate for the population
- which also was a parameter
- then we're also going to calculate it for the sample
- and estimate it for the population
- was the variance.
- Which was a measure of how dispersed or how
- much the data points vary from the mean.
- So let's write variance:
- How do we denote and calculate variance for a population?
- well for a population we'd say that the variance - we use the greek letter sigma squared -
- is equal to the squared distances from the population mean.
- But what we do is we take
- for each data point
- so i equal 1 all the way to N
- we take that data point, subtract from it the population mean
- so if you want to calculate this you'd want to
- figure this out. Well that's one way to do it
- we'll see there are other ways to do it
- where you can kind of calculate them at the same time
- but the easiest or the most intuitive is to calculate
- this first, then for each of the data points take the data point
- and subtract from that the mean, square it and then
- divide by the total number of data points we have.
- Now we get to the interesting part:
- Sample variance.
- There's several ways, when people talk about the sample variance,
- there's several tools in their toolkits, there's several ways to calculate it.
- One way is the biased sample variance, the non unbiased estimator
- of the population variance and that's denoted
- usually by an S squared with subscript n
- and what is the biased estimator?
- How do we calculate it?
- Well we would calculate it very similiar to how we would calculate it over here.
- But we would do it for our sample not our population.
- So for every data point in our sample, so we have n of them
- we take that data point, from it we subtract our sample mean
- square it and then divide by the number of data points that we have.
- But we already talked about in the last video
- how would we find, what is our best unbiased estimate of the population variance.
- We're trying to find an unbiased estimate of the population variance.
- Well in the last video we talked about
- if we want to have an unbiased estimate and
- here in this video I want to give you a sense, an intuition why
- we would take the sum, so we're going to go through
- every data point in our sample, we're going to take that data point
- subtract the sample mean, square that, but
- instead of dividing by n, we will divide by n minus 1.
- We're dividing by a smaller number and
- when you divide by a smaller number,
- you're going to get a larger value.
- So this is going to be larger
- this is going to be smaller.
- and this one we refer to as the unbiased estimate
- and this one we refer to as the biased estimate.
- if people just write this, they're talking about the sample variance
- it's a good idea to clarify which one they're talking about
- but if you had to guess and people would give you no further information
- they're probably talking about the unbiased estimate.
- So you'd probably divide by n minus 1.
- But let's think about why this estimate will be
- biased and why might want to have an estimate like this.
- that is larger.
- and maybe in the future we can have a computer program or something
- that really makes us feel better that dividing by n-1 gives us
- a better estimate of the true population variance.
- so let's imagine all of the data in a population and I'm just going to plot them on
- a number. All the data. So this is my number line. And let me plot all of the data points in my population.
- So this is some data, this is some data, here is some data and here is some data here
- and I can just do as many points as I want.
- So these are just points on the number line. Now let's say I take
- a sample of this. So this is my entire population, so let's
- see, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
- so in this case what would be my big N?
- my big N would be 14.
- Now let's say I take a sample. A lower case n of, let's say my sample size is 3.
- I could take... before I even think about that, let's
- think about roughly were the mean of this population would sit.
- So the way I drew it, I'm not going to calculate it exactly, it looks like
- the mean might sit someplace roughly right over here.
- So the mean, the true population mean, the parameter is going to sit
- right over here. Now let's think what happens when we sample
- and I'm going to do just a very small sample size just to give us an intuition, but
- this is true of any sample size. So let's say we have sample size of
- 3.
- So there is some possibility that when we take our sample size of 3 that
- we happen to sample in a way that our sample mean is pretty close to our population mean.
- So e.g. if we sample that point, that point and that point I could imagine our sample mean
- might actually sit pretty close to our population mean.
- But there's a distinct possibility that maybe when I take
- a sample and I sample that, that and that and the key
- idea here is that when you take a sample, your sample mean is always going to sit within your sample.
- So there is a possibility that when you take your sample your mean could even be outside of the
- sample and so in this situation and this is just to give you an intuition, so here
- your sample mean is going to be sitting someplace in there.
- And so if your were to just calculate the distance from
- each of these points to the sample mean, so
- this distance, that distance and you square it and
- were to divide by the number of data points you have
- this is going to be a much lower estimate than the true variance from the actual population mean.
- Where these things are much, much, much further.
- Now you're always not going to have the true population mean outside of your sample
- but it's possible you do.
- so in general this, if you just take your points,
- find the squared distance to the sample mean, which
- is always going to sit inside of your data, even though
- the true population mean could be oustide of it, then
- or it could be at on end of your data, however you might want to think about it
- then your are likely to be underestimating the true population variance.
- So this right over here is underestimate.
- And it does turn out that if you just instead of
- dividing by n divide by n-1
- you'll get a slightly larger sample variance
- and this is an unbiased estiamte.
- And in the next video and I might not get to in immediately
- I would like to generate some type of computer program that is more convincing
- that this is better estimate
- of the population variance than this is.
Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:
At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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