1

In the book "Numerical Recipes in C" there is said that

there is a long story about why the denominator of variance is $N-1$ instead of $N$. If you have never heard that story, you may consult any good statistics text.

What is that story? What book is the story written in?

Sycorax
  • 76,417
  • 20
  • 189
  • 313
Turkhan Badalov
  • 111
  • 2
  • 1
    It has to do with unbiasedness of the estimate. This question could probably be labeled as a duplicate to a large number of previous questions on this site. – Michael R. Chernick Dec 30 '17 at 17:23
  • @MichaelChernick do you understand that I don't ask the reason or intuition behind this? I am interested in historical reasons and events on this, and mostly the story meant in the book. – Turkhan Badalov Dec 30 '17 at 17:25
  • @MichaelChernick please show the duplicate question if there is one – Turkhan Badalov Dec 30 '17 at 17:27
  • 1
    If you are interested in the *history*, then please make that evident in the question itself. Few statistics books actually discuss history, so the meaning of the NR quotation is not going to be understood by most readers as referring to history at all. And, after all, the "book" you request has already been named by NR: ["any good statistics text."](https://stats.stackexchange.com/search?q=textbook) – whuber Dec 30 '17 at 17:33
  • @whuber even so, what did the author mean by that story? If you understand and it is so obvious then please elaborate – Turkhan Badalov Dec 30 '17 at 17:38
  • 1
    I do not see why any elaboration is needed: the advice is perfectly clear. Have you consulted a good statistics text yet? – whuber Dec 30 '17 at 17:47
  • This might be a good question for [HSM.SE] – Sycorax Dec 30 '17 at 18:10
  • 1
    See Wikipedia's article titled "Bessel's correction". – Michael Hardy Dec 30 '17 at 18:55

0 Answers0