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Consistency (statistics)
In statistics, consistency of procedures, such as computing confidence intervals or conducting hypothesis tests, is a desired property of their behaviour as the number of items in the data set to which they are applied increases indefinitely. In particular, consistency requires that as the dataset size increases, the outcome of the procedure approaches the correct outcome. (entries for consistency, consistent estimator, consistent test) Use of the term in statistics derives from Sir Ronald Fisher in 1922. Use of the terms ''consistency'' and ''consistent'' in statistics is restricted to cases where essentially the same procedure can be applied to any number of data items. In complicated applications of statistics, there may be several ways in which the number of data items may grow. For example, records for rainfall within an area might increase in three ways: records for additional time periods; records for additional sites with a fixed area; records for extra sites obtained by ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model to be studied. Populations can be diverse groups of people or objects such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with every aspect of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of statistical survey, surveys and experimental design, experiments. When census data (comprising every member of the target population) cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey sample (statistics), samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Classification
When classification is performed by a computer, statistical methods are normally used to develop the algorithm. Often, the individual observations are analyzed into a set of quantifiable properties, known variously as explanatory variables or ''features''. These properties may variously be categorical (e.g. "A", "B", "AB" or "O", for blood type), ordinal (e.g. "large", "medium" or "small"), integer-valued (e.g. the number of occurrences of a particular word in an email) or real-valued (e.g. a measurement of blood pressure). Other classifiers work by comparing observations to previous observations by means of a similarity or distance function. An algorithm that implements classification, especially in a concrete implementation, is known as a classifier. The term "classifier" sometimes also refers to the mathematical function, implemented by a classification algorithm, that maps input data to a category. Terminology across fields is quite varied. In statistics, where classi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Internal Consistency
In statistics and research, internal consistency is typically a measure based on the correlations between different items on the same test (or the same subscale on a larger test). It measures whether several items that propose to measure the same general construct produce similar scores. For example, if a respondent expressed agreement with the statements "I like to ride bicycles" and "I've enjoyed riding bicycles in the past", and disagreement with the statement "I hate bicycles", this would be indicative of good internal consistency of the test. Cronbach's alpha Internal consistency is usually measured with Cronbach's alpha, a statistic calculated from the pairwise correlations between items. Internal consistency ranges between negative infinity and one. Coefficient alpha will be negative whenever there is greater within-subject variability than between-subject variability. A commonly accepted rule of thumb for describing internal consistency is as follows: Very high reliabil ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Homogeneity (statistics)
In statistics, homogeneity and its opposite, heterogeneity, arise in describing the properties of a dataset, or several datasets. They relate to the validity of the often convenient assumption that the statistical properties of any one part of an overall dataset are the same as any other part. In meta-analysis, which combines the data from several studies, homogeneity measures the differences or similarities between the several studies (see also Study heterogeneity). Homogeneity can be studied to several degrees of complexity. For example, considerations of homoscedasticity examine how much the variability of data-values changes throughout a dataset. However, questions of homogeneity apply to all aspects of the statistical distributions, including the location parameter. Thus, a more detailed study would examine changes to the whole of the marginal distribution. An intermediate-level study might move from looking at the variability to studying changes in the skewness. In addit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Consistent Estimator
In statistics, a consistent estimator or asymptotically consistent estimator is an estimator—a rule for computing estimates of a parameter ''θ''0—having the property that as the number of data points used increases indefinitely, the resulting sequence of estimates converges in probability to ''θ''0. This means that the distributions of the estimates become more and more concentrated near the true value of the parameter being estimated, so that the probability of the estimator being arbitrarily close to ''θ''0 converges to one. In practice one constructs an estimator as a function of an available sample of size ''n'', and then imagines being able to keep collecting data and expanding the sample ''ad infinitum''. In this way one would obtain a sequence of estimates indexed by ''n'', and consistency is a property of what occurs as the sample size “grows to infinity”. If the sequence of estimates can be mathematically shown to converge in probability to the true value '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Biased Estimator
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 property of an estimator. Bias is a distinct concept from consistency: consistent estimators converge in probability to the true value of the parameter, but may be biased or unbiased (see bias versus consistency for more). All else being equal, an unbiased estimator is preferable to a biased estimator, although in practice, biased estimators (with generally small bias) are frequently used. When a biased estimator is used, bounds of the bias are calculated. A biased estimator may be used for various reasons: because an unbiased estimator does not exist without further assumptions about a population; because an estimator is difficult to compute (as in unbiased estimation of standard deviation); because a biased estima ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Law Of Large Numbers
In probability theory, the law of large numbers is a mathematical law that states that the average of the results obtained from a large number of independent random samples converges to the true value, if it exists. More formally, the law of large numbers states that given a sample of independent and identically distributed values, the sample mean converges to the true mean. The law of large numbers is important because it guarantees stable long-term results for the averages of some random events. For example, while a casino may lose money in a single spin of the roulette wheel, its earnings will tend towards a predictable percentage over a large number of spins. Any winning streak by a player will eventually be overcome by the parameters of the game. Importantly, the law applies (as the name indicates) only when a ''large number'' of observations are considered. There is no principle that a small number of observations will coincide with the expected value or that a stre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard Deviation
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its Expected value, mean. A low standard Deviation (statistics), deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range. The standard deviation is commonly used in the determination of what constitutes an outlier and what does not. Standard deviation may be abbreviated SD or std dev, and is most commonly represented in mathematical texts and equations by the lowercase Greek alphabet, Greek letter Sigma, σ (sigma), for the population standard deviation, or the Latin script, Latin letter ''s'', for the sample standard deviation. The standard deviation of a random variable, Sample (statistics), sample, statistical population, data set, or probability distribution is the square root of its variance. (For a finite population, v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sample Standard Deviation
In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its mean. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range. The standard deviation is commonly used in the determination of what constitutes an outlier and what does not. Standard deviation may be abbreviated SD or std dev, and is most commonly represented in mathematical texts and equations by the lowercase Greek letter σ (sigma), for the population standard deviation, or the Latin letter '' s'', for the sample standard deviation. The standard deviation of a random variable, sample, statistical population, data set, or probability distribution is the square root of its variance. (For a finite population, variance is the average of the squared deviations from the mean.) A useful property of the sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Power
In frequentist statistics, power is the probability of detecting a given effect (if that effect actually exists) using a given test in a given context. In typical use, it is a function of the specific test that is used (including the choice of test statistic and significance level), the sample size (more data tends to provide more power), and the effect size (effects or correlations that are large relative to the variability of the data tend to provide more power). More formally, in the case of a simple hypothesis test with two hypotheses, the power of the test is the probability that the test correctly rejects the null hypothesis (H_0) when the alternative hypothesis (H_1) is true. It is commonly denoted by 1-\beta, where \beta is the probability of making a type II error (a false negative) conditional on there being a true effect or association. Background Statistical testing uses data from samples to assess, or make inferences about, a statistical population. Fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Hypothesis Testing
A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data provide sufficient evidence to reject a particular hypothesis. A statistical hypothesis test typically involves a calculation of a test statistic. Then a decision is made, either by comparing the test statistic to a Critical value (statistics), critical value or equivalently by evaluating a p-value, ''p''-value computed from the test statistic. Roughly 100 list of statistical tests, specialized statistical tests are in use and noteworthy. History While hypothesis testing was popularized early in the 20th century, early forms were used in the 1700s. The first use is credited to John Arbuthnot (1710), followed by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1770s), in analyzing the human sex ratio at birth; see . Choice of null hypothesis Paul Meehl has argued that the epistemological importance of the choice of null hypothesis has gone largely unacknowledged. When the null hypothesis is predicted by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
