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Probit Regression
In statistics, a probit model is a type of regression where the dependent variable can take only two values, for example married or not married. The word is a portmanteau, coming from ''probability'' + ''unit''. The purpose of the model is to estimate the probability that an observation with particular characteristics will fall into a specific one of the categories; moreover, classifying observations based on their predicted probabilities is a type of binary classification model. A probit model is a popular specification for a binary response model. As such it treats the same set of problems as does logistic regression using similar techniques. When viewed in the generalized linear model framework, the probit model employs a probit link function. It is most often estimated using the maximum likelihood procedure, such an estimation being called a probit regression. Conceptual framework Suppose a response variable ''Y'' is ''binary'', that is it can have only two possible out ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistics
Statistics (from German: '' Statistik'', "description of a 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 surveys and experiments.Dodge, Y. (2006) ''The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms'', Oxford University Press. When census data cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample to the population as a whole. An ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maximum Likelihood
In statistics, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a method of estimating the parameters of an assumed probability distribution, given some observed data. This is achieved by maximizing a likelihood function so that, under the assumed statistical model, the observed data is most probable. The point in the parameter space that maximizes the likelihood function is called the maximum likelihood estimate. The logic of maximum likelihood is both intuitive and flexible, and as such the method has become a dominant means of statistical inference. If the likelihood function is differentiable, the derivative test for finding maxima can be applied. In some cases, the first-order conditions of the likelihood function can be solved analytically; for instance, the ordinary least squares estimator for a linear regression model maximizes the likelihood when all observed outcomes are assumed to have Normal distributions with the same variance. From the perspective of Bayesian infere ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Truncated Distribution
In statistics, a truncated distribution is a conditional distribution that results from restricting the domain of some other probability distribution. Truncated distributions arise in practical statistics in cases where the ability to record, or even to know about, occurrences is limited to values which lie above or below a given threshold or within a specified range. For example, if the dates of birth of children in a school are examined, these would typically be subject to truncation relative to those of all children in the area given that the school accepts only children in a given age range on a specific date. There would be no information about how many children in the locality had dates of birth before or after the school's cutoff dates if only a direct approach to the school were used to obtain information. Where sampling is such as to retain knowledge of items that fall outside the required range, without recording the actual values, this is known as censoring, as opposed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iverson Bracket
In mathematics, the Iverson bracket, named after Kenneth E. Iverson, is a notation that generalises the Kronecker delta, which is the Iverson bracket of the statement . It maps any statement to a function of the free variables in that statement. This function is defined to take the value 1 for the values of the variables for which the statement is true, and takes the value 0 otherwise. It is generally denoted by putting the statement inside square brackets: = \begin 1 & \text P \text \\ 0 & \text \end In other words, the Iverson bracket of a statement is the indicator function of the set of values for which the statement is true. The Iverson bracket allows using capital-sigma notation without summation index. That is, for any property P(k) of the integer k, \sum_kf(k)\, (k)= \sum_f(k). By convention, f(k) does not need to be defined for the values of for which the Iverson bracket equals ; that is, a summand f(k) textbf/math> must evaluate to 0 regardless of whether f(k) is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bayesian Linear Regression
Bayesian linear regression is a type of conditional modeling in which the mean of one variable is described by a linear combination of other variables, with the goal of obtaining the posterior probability of the regression coefficients (as well as other parameters describing the distribution of the regressand) and ultimately allowing the out-of-sample prediction of the regressand (often labelled y) '' conditional on'' observed values of the regressors (usually X). The simplest and most widely used version of this model is the ''normal linear model'', in which y given X is distributed Gaussian. In this model, and under a particular choice of prior probabilities for the parameters—so-called conjugate priors—the posterior can be found analytically. With more arbitrarily chosen priors, the posteriors generally have to be approximated. Model setup Consider a standard linear regression problem, in which for i = 1, \ldots, n we specify the mean of the conditional distribution o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prior Distribution
In Bayesian statistical inference, a prior probability distribution, often simply called the prior, of an uncertain quantity is the probability distribution that would express one's beliefs about this quantity before some evidence is taken into account. For example, the prior could be the probability distribution representing the relative proportions of voters who will vote for a particular politician in a future election. The unknown quantity may be a parameter of the model or a latent variable rather than an observable variable. Bayes' theorem calculates the renormalized pointwise product of the prior and the likelihood function, to produce the '' posterior probability distribution'', which is the conditional distribution of the uncertain quantity given the data. Similarly, the prior probability of a random event or an uncertain proposition is the unconditional probability that is assigned before any relevant evidence is taken into account. Priors can be created using a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gibbs Sampling
In statistics, Gibbs sampling or a Gibbs sampler is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for obtaining a sequence of observations which are approximated from a specified multivariate probability distribution, when direct sampling is difficult. This sequence can be used to approximate the joint distribution (e.g., to generate a histogram of the distribution); to approximate the marginal distribution of one of the variables, or some subset of the variables (for example, the unknown parameters or latent variables); or to compute an integral (such as the expected value of one of the variables). Typically, some of the variables correspond to observations whose values are known, and hence do not need to be sampled. Gibbs sampling is commonly used as a means of statistical inference, especially Bayesian inference. It is a randomized algorithm (i.e. an algorithm that makes use of random numbers), and is an alternative to deterministic algorithms for statistical inferenc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Generalized Least Squares
In statistics, generalized least squares (GLS) is a technique for estimating the unknown parameters in a linear regression model when there is a certain degree of correlation between the residuals in a regression model. In these cases, ordinary least squares and weighted least squares can be statistically inefficient, or even give misleading inferences. GLS was first described by Alexander Aitken in 1936. Method outline In standard linear regression models we observe data \_ on ''n'' statistical units. The response values are placed in a vector \mathbf = \left( y_, \dots, y_ \right)^, and the predictor values are placed in the design matrix \mathbf = \left( \mathbf_^, \dots, \mathbf_^ \right)^, where \mathbf_ = \left( 1, x_, \dots, x_ \right) is a vector of the ''k'' predictor variables (including a constant) for the ''i''th unit. The model forces the conditional mean of \mathbf given \mathbf to be a linear function of \mathbf, and assumes the conditional variance of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Probability Density Function
In probability theory, a probability density function (PDF), or density of a continuous random variable, is a function whose value at any given sample (or point) in the sample space (the set of possible values taken by the random variable) can be interpreted as providing a ''relative likelihood'' that the value of the random variable would be close to that sample. Probability density is the probability per unit length, in other words, while the ''absolute likelihood'' for a continuous random variable to take on any particular value is 0 (since there is an infinite set of possible values to begin with), the value of the PDF at two different samples can be used to infer, in any particular draw of the random variable, how much more likely it is that the random variable would be close to one sample compared to the other sample. In a more precise sense, the PDF is used to specify the probability of the random variable falling ''within a particular range of values'', as opposed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Concave Function
In mathematics, a concave function is the negative of a convex function. A concave function is also synonymously called concave downwards, concave down, convex upwards, convex cap, or upper convex. Definition A real-valued function f on an interval (or, more generally, a convex set in vector space) is said to be ''concave'' if, for any x and y in the interval and for any \alpha \in ,1/math>, :f((1-\alpha )x+\alpha y)\geq (1-\alpha ) f(x)+\alpha f(y) A function is called ''strictly concave'' if :f((1-\alpha )x + \alpha y) > (1-\alpha) f(x) + \alpha f(y)\, for any \alpha \in (0,1) and x \neq y. For a function f: \mathbb \to \mathbb, this second definition merely states that for every z strictly between x and y, the point (z, f(z)) on the graph of f is above the straight line joining the points (x, f(x)) and (y, f(y)). A function f is quasiconcave if the upper contour sets of the function S(a)=\ are convex sets. Properties Functions of a single variable # A differentia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Efficiency (statistics)
In statistics, efficiency is a measure of quality of an estimator, of an experimental design, or of a hypothesis testing procedure. Essentially, a more efficient estimator, needs fewer input data or observations than a less efficient one to achieve the Cramér–Rao bound. An ''efficient estimator'' is characterized by having the smallest possible variance, indicating that there is a small deviance between the estimated value and the "true" value in the L2 norm sense. The relative efficiency of two procedures is the ratio of their efficiencies, although often this concept is used where the comparison is made between a given procedure and a notional "best possible" procedure. The efficiencies and the relative efficiency of two procedures theoretically depend on the sample size available for the given procedure, but it is often possible to use the asymptotic relative efficiency (defined as the limit of the relative efficiencies as the sample size grows) as the principal compa ... [...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] |
