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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 the outcome of the procedure with unlimited data should identify the underlying truth.Dodge, Y. (2003) ''The Oxford Dictionary of Statistical Terms'', OUP. (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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistics
Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "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.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 sample (statistics), samples. Representative sampling as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Confidence Interval
In frequentist statistics, a confidence interval (CI) is a range of estimates for an unknown parameter. A confidence interval is computed at a designated ''confidence level''; the 95% confidence level is most common, but other levels, such as 90% or 99%, are sometimes used. The confidence level represents the long-run proportion of corresponding CIs that contain the true value of the parameter. For example, out of all intervals computed at the 95% level, 95% of them should contain the parameter's true value. Factors affecting the width of the CI include the sample size, the variability in the sample, and the confidence level. All else being the same, a larger sample produces a narrower confidence interval, greater variability in the sample produces a wider confidence interval, and a higher confidence level produces a wider confidence interval. Definition Let be a random sample from a probability distribution with statistical parameter , which is a quantity to be estimate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hypothesis Test
A statistical hypothesis test is a method of statistical inference used to decide whether the data at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters. History Early use 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 . Modern origins and early controversy Modern significance testing is largely the product of Karl Pearson (p-value, ''p''-value, Pearson's chi-squared test), William Sealy Gosset (Student's t-distribution), and Ronald Fisher ("null hypothesis", analysis of variance, "statistical significance, significance test"), while hypothesis testing was developed by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson (son of Karl). Ronald Fisher began his life in statistics as a Bayesian (Zabell 1992), but Fisher ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ronald Fisher
Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (17 February 1890 – 29 July 1962) was a British polymath who was active as a mathematician, statistician, biologist, geneticist, and academic. For his work in statistics, he has been described as "a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science" and "the single most important figure in 20th century statistics". In genetics, his work used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics and natural selection; this contributed to the revival of Darwinism in the early 20th-century revision of the theory of evolution known as the modern synthesis. For his contributions to biology, Fisher has been called "the greatest of Darwin’s successors". Fisher held strong views on race and eugenics, insisting on racial differences. Although he was clearly a eugenist and advocated for the legalization of voluntary sterilization of those with heritable mental disabilities, there is some debate as to whether Fisher supported sc ... [...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] |
Random Variable
A random variable (also called random quantity, aleatory variable, or stochastic variable) is a mathematical formalization of a quantity or object which depends on random events. It is a mapping or a function from possible outcomes (e.g., the possible upper sides of a flipped coin such as heads H and tails T) in a sample space (e.g., the set \) to a measurable space, often the real numbers (e.g., \ in which 1 corresponding to H and -1 corresponding to T). Informally, randomness typically represents some fundamental element of chance, such as in the roll of a dice; it may also represent uncertainty, such as measurement error. However, the interpretation of probability is philosophically complicated, and even in specific cases is not always straightforward. The purely mathematical analysis of random variables is independent of such interpretational difficulties, and can be based upon a rigorous axiomatic setup. In the formal mathematical language of measure theory, a random var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Convergence Of Random Variables
In probability theory, there exist several different notions of convergence of random variables. The convergence of sequences of random variables to some limit random variable is an important concept in probability theory, and its applications to statistics and stochastic processes. The same concepts are known in more general mathematics as stochastic convergence and they formalize the idea that a sequence of essentially random or unpredictable events can sometimes be expected to settle down into a behavior that is essentially unchanging when items far enough into the sequence are studied. The different possible notions of convergence relate to how such a behavior can be characterized: two readily understood behaviors are that the sequence eventually takes a constant value, and that values in the sequence continue to change but can be described by an unchanging probability distribution. Background "Stochastic convergence" formalizes the idea that a sequence of essentially rando ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fisher Consistency
In statistics, Fisher consistency, named after Ronald Fisher, is a desirable property of an estimator asserting that if the estimator were calculated using the entire population rather than a sample, the true value of the estimated parameter would be obtained. Definition Suppose we have a statistical sample ''X''1, ..., ''X''''n'' where each ''X''''i'' follows a cumulative distribution ''F''''θ'' which depends on an unknown parameter ''θ''. If an estimator of ''θ'' based on the sample can be represented as a functional of the empirical distribution function ''F̂n'': :\hat =T(\hat F_n) \,, the estimator is said to be ''Fisher consistent'' if: :T(F_\theta) = \theta \, . As long as the ''X''''i'' are exchangeable, an estimator ''T'' defined in terms of the ''X''''i'' can be converted into an estimator ''T′'' that can be defined in terms of ''F̂n'' by averaging ''T'' over all permutations of the data. The resulting estimator will have the same expected value as ''T ... [...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 at hand sufficiently support a particular hypothesis. Hypothesis testing allows us to make probabilistic statements about population parameters. History Early use 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 . Modern origins and early controversy Modern significance testing is largely the product of Karl Pearson ( ''p''-value, Pearson's chi-squared test), William Sealy Gosset ( Student's t-distribution), and Ronald Fisher ("null hypothesis", analysis of variance, "significance test"), while hypothesis testing was developed by Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson (son of Karl). Ronald Fisher began his life in statistics as a Bayesian (Zabell 1992), but Fisher soon grew disenchanted with t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Power
In statistics, the power of a binary hypothesis test is the probability that the test correctly rejects the null hypothesis (H_0) when a specific alternative hypothesis (H_1) is true. It is commonly denoted by 1-\beta, and represents the chances of a true positive detection conditional on the actual existence of an effect to detect. Statistical power ranges from 0 to 1, and as the power of a test increases, the probability \beta of making a type II error by wrongly failing to reject the null hypothesis decreases. Notation This article uses the following notation: * ''β'' = probability of a Type II error, known as a "false negative" * 1 − ''β'' = probability of a "true positive", i.e., correctly rejecting the null hypothesis. "1 − ''β''" is also known as the power of the test. * ''α'' = probability of a Type I error, known as a "false positive" * 1 − ''α'' = probability of a "true negative", i.e., correctly not rejecting the null hypothesis Description For a ty ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Statistical Classification
In statistics, classification is the problem of identifying which of a set of categories (sub-populations) an observation (or observations) belongs to. Examples are assigning a given email to the "spam" or "non-spam" class, and assigning a diagnosis to a given patient based on observed characteristics of the patient (sex, blood pressure, presence or absence of certain symptoms, etc.). 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 ... [...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] |
