Linked Questions

2 votes
0 answers
2k views

Degrees of freedom in covariance calculation [duplicate]

When calculating the sample covariance, why do we divide by $n-1$ instead of $n-2$? Don't we lose two degrees of freedom since we need to calculate two sample means? For example, when estimating the ...
Harry Stuart's user avatar
4 votes
0 answers
74 views

Sample Covariance [duplicate]

The sample covariance is defined as $\hat{\sigma}_{xy}:=\frac1{n-1} \sum_{i=1}^n (x_i -\bar{x})(y_i-\bar{y})$. What is the intuition for using the correction term $n-1$ instead of $n-2$. Because we ...
bachelor's user avatar
  • 363
1 vote
0 answers
64 views

Understanding "we lose degrees of freedom in product deviations"? [duplicate]

I'm having a tricky time understanding the statement: we lose $n−1$ [degrees of freedom] by computing the product deviations [in $cov(x,y)$] I'm not necessarily looking for an overview of ...
user101490's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
29 views

Why does computing product derivations eliminate degrees of freedom? [duplicate]

I'm trying to get an intuition as to why degrees of freedom is n - 1 when calculating sample covariance. This is what I found: 1) Start with 2n degrees of freedom from the bivariate data 2) Lose 2 ...
Trajanson's user avatar
  • 121
30 votes
10 answers
4k views

Sample two numbers from 1 to 10; maximize the expected product

Assume you sample two numbers, randomly drawn from 1 to 10; you could choose two strategies: 1) pick with replacement and 2) pick without replacement. Which strategy would you prefer to maximize the ...
user334639's user avatar
9 votes
2 answers
12k views

Covariance of two sample means

I am trying to derive the covariance of two sample means and get confused at one point. Given is a sample of size $n$ with paired dependent observations $x_i$ and $y_i$ as realizations of RVs $X$ and $...
tomka's user avatar
  • 6,724
7 votes
2 answers
7k views

Variance and covariance in the context of deterministic variables

Questions: Can we talk about: variance of a deterministic variable?; covariance between a deterministic variable and a stochastic variable?; covariance between two deterministic variables? Are these ...
Richard Hardy's user avatar
9 votes
3 answers
1k views

Why is Covariance Useful?

There are a number of topics related to covariance on this site. What I am having trouble grasping: why is covariance a useful thing to calculate? As far as I see it, covariance is not a helpful ...
ST21's user avatar
  • 185
7 votes
2 answers
9k views

Variance of the sum of random vectors

Let $X_1, X_2, \dots , X_n \sim G$ where $G$ is some distribution and the samples are not independent. If $X_i \in \mathbb{R}$, then I know that $$\text{Var}\left(\sum_{i=1}^{n} X_i \right) = n\text{...
Greenparker's user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
7k views

Efficient way to compute distances between centroids from distance matrix

Let us have square symmetric matrix of squared euclidean distances $\bf D$ between $n$ points and vector lengthed $n$ indicating cluster or group membership ($k$ clusters) of the points; a cluster may ...
ttnphns's user avatar
  • 58.8k
2 votes
2 answers
2k views

When are OLS linear regression parameters inaccurate?

Q1: Show quantitatively that OLS regression can be applied inconsistently for linear parameters estimation. OLS in y returns a minimum error regression line for estimating y-values given a fixed x-...
Carl's user avatar
  • 13.3k
2 votes
2 answers
2k views

Standard Deviation is to variance as ____ is to covariance?

I'm looking at the bivariate relationships among a set of time-series data that have the same units. I have computed the covariance matrix and am working on interpreting it. My hunch is that it would ...
Neuromancer's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
2k views

formula for sample covariance: Bessel's correction

Two options for the sample covariance between X and Y: 1)(with Bessel's) COV(X,Y) = $1/(n-1)$ * $\Sigma$ $(Xi - mean(X))$*$(Yi - mean(Y))$ 2)(without) COV(X,Y) = $1/n$ * $\Sigma$ $(Xi - mean(X))$*$(...
user208557's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

Uncorrected sample standard deviation in correlation coefficient

There seems to be a common use of the uncorrected sample standard deviation in calculating the correlation coefficient: https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/2728/Covariance-and-Correlation-in-MS-...
StatSmartWannaB's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
2k views

Dividing by degrees of freedom [duplicate]

When estimating parameters such as (I don't care about this specific instance particularly) Variance of a random variable X, one usually adopts Bessel's correction, i.e. using the formula $\hat{Var}{(...
mdc's user avatar
  • 141

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