Questions tagged [precision]

Precision is about variability while (in contrast to precision), accuracy is about bias.

Precision is a property of statistical estimators and of measurements.

Precision of an estimator is the degree of variability (scatter) of the estimates around their mean. High precision means low variability around the mean. Precision can be contrasted to accuracy; precision is about variability while accuracy is about bias.

Any statistical procedure to generate a numerical estimate or prediction is said to be precise when its sampling distribution has low scatter, typically measured as a variance. An estimator or forecast rule can be said to be accurate when a central value (usually, its expectation) equals the estimand or the central value of the target of the forecast, respectively. The two concepts are independent of each other, so a particular estimator or forecast rule can be accurate, precise, both, or neither.

For example, lack of precision (large variability) may result from a small sample on which the estimation or forecasting is based. Increasing the sample size alone may improve precision but does not necessarily improve accuracy. Meanwhile, lack of accuracy (large bias) may result from a systematic error. Eliminating the systematic error improves accuracy but does not necessarily change precision.

Statistical literature may prefer the terms bias and variability instead of accuracy and precision: bias is the amount of inaccuracy and variability is the amount of imprecision.

(Loosely based on Wikipedia's article "Accuracy and precision".)

In the context of measurements, accuracy is the tendency of the measurements to agree with the true values. Precision is the degree to which the measurements pin down an actual value.

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How should tiny $p$-values be reported? (and why does R put a minimum on 2.22e-16?)

For some tests in R, there is a lower limit on the p-value calculations of $2.22 \cdot 10^{-16}$. I'm not sure why it's this number, if there is a good reason for it or if it's just arbitrary. A lot of other stats packages just go to 0.0001, so this…
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What do confidence intervals say about precision (if anything)?

Morey et al (2015) argue that confidence intervals are misleading and there are multiple bias related to understanding of them. Among others, they describe the precision fallacy as following: The Precision fallacy The width of a confidence interval…
Tim
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Antonym of variance

Is there a word that means the 'inverse of variance'? That is, if $X$ has high variance, then $X$ has low $\dots$? Not interested in a near antonym (like 'agreement' or 'similarity') but specifically meaning $1/\sigma^2$?
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Are there parameters where a biased estimator is considered "better" than the unbiased estimator?

A perfect estimator would be accurate (unbiased) and precise (good estimation even with small samples). I never really thought of the question of precision but only the one of accuracy (as I did in Estimator of $\frac{\sigma^2}{\mu (1 - \mu)}$ when…
Remi.b
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Meaning of Square Root of Covariance / Precision Matrices

Say $X \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is a random variable with covariance $\Sigma \in \mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$. By definition, entries of the covariance matrix are covariances: $$ \Sigma_{ij} = Cov( X_i,X_j). $$ Also, it is known that entries of the precision…
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How to compute accuracy for multi class classification problem and how is accuracy equal to weighted precision?

Consider the example in this article http://text-analytics101.rxnlp.com/2014/10/computing-precision-and-recall-for.html Will accuracy be (30 + 60 + 80)/300? what is weighted precision?
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How do you interpret the area under the precision-recall curve?

I recently learned of precision-recall curves as an alternative to ROC curves for testing the performance of a binary classification model. However, I don't know how to interpret the meaning of the area under a precision-recall curve. Is it the…
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Why use precision instead of variance in a prior?

I am a newcomer in the field of statistic. I am wondering about using precision instead of variance in a prior.
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What determines the precision of uncertainties?

What limits the precision with which you can describe the uncertainty of a measurement? I will describe two examples that feel qualitatively different, but I am not sure if they are quantitatively different in how you would deal with the…
Samuel
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bias-variance tradeoff vs precision and recall

Can anyone explain the link between bias-variance tradeoff and precision-recall tradeoff. Are they effectively the same thing?
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accuracy and precision in regression vs classification

Are accuracy and precision the same things in regression and classification? In regression: accuracy is bias, and precision is inverse of variance. In classification: accuracy is correct prediction over number of samples, and precision is true…
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How do I call a forecast that is both accurate and precise?

How do I call a forecast (more precisely, a forecasting rule) that is both accurate and precise? Is there a word that expresses both properties combined? I do not mean the forecasting rule is perfect, i.e. it does not have to produce forecasts that…
Richard Hardy
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What is the difference between accuracy and precision?

I read the material on the difference betweeen accuracy and precision, but it makes me feel confused. Can I define accuracy…
GoingMyWay
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Disadvantage of precision at k

Suppose 10 documents were retrieved (rectangle with black color is relevant document). In the following table, Precision @ k is calculated. P@10 or "Precision at 10" corresponds to the number of relevant results among the top 10 documents. |…
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Should I calculate the mean and standard deviation with raw or transformed data?

I'm an undergrad chemistry student, and in a recent laboratory session, we were given a set of observations for the volume of a solution in order to find an unknown concentration of a reactant $R$, via titration. The objective was to calculate an…
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