#### Announcements

• Suggested reading on course page
• Homework 5 will be posted soon
• Mid-course survey also coming soon

#### Bias

• Using an estimator $$\hat \theta$$ of the parameter $$\theta$$. Is this a good idea?
• The bias of $$\hat \theta$$ is $\text{Bias}(\hat \theta) = E[\hat \theta - \theta] = E[\hat \theta] - \theta$
• We say $$\hat \theta$$ is unbiased for $$\theta$$ if $$\text{Bias}(\hat \theta) = 0$$.
• Last time we considered $$U_1, \ldots U_n \sim U[0,\theta]$$ and using the maximum $$U_{(n)}$$ as an estimate of $$\theta$$
• For that example we found $$E[U_{(n)}] = \frac{n-1}{n}\theta < \theta$$, the sample maximum underestimated the true maximum.

#### Mean squared error

• How good is an estimator? One way to quantify this is the mean squard error $\text{MSE}(\hat \theta) = E[(\hat \theta - \theta)^2]$
• If we imagine repeating the data collection many times and computing $$\hat \theta$$ repeatedly, then MSE is the average squared distance of $$\hat \theta$$ from the true value.
• Exercise: what is the MSE of $$\bar X$$ as an estimator of $$\mu = E[X]$$?
• Solving an earlier mystery: why is $$n-1$$ the denominator in the sample standard deviation, instead of $$n$$? $E\left[\frac{1}{n} \sum_{i=1}^n (X_i - \bar X)^2\right] = \frac{n-1}{n} \text{Var}(X)$
• Using $$n-1$$ gives an unbiased estimate of the variance.

• With a bit of algebra (maybe do this on the board), we can show $\text{MSE}(\hat \theta) = \text{Bias}(\hat \theta)^2 + \text{Var}(\hat \theta)$
• To make MSE small, we want to make bias small and also make variance small…
• Unfortunately it is not always possible to do both. There are limits.
• Consider using the constant $$c$$ as an estimator. $$\text{Bias}(c) = c - \theta$$, $$\text{Var}(c) = 0$$. Low variance, but high bias (remember $$\theta$$ is unknown so $$c = \theta$$ is not an estimator)
• See the dartboard figure here (maybe draw on board)

#### Multiple parameters

• Probability models don’t always have just one parameter, complicated situations may require more. Modern statistics often deals with high dimensional problems with many parameters.
• Suppose we have $$p$$ parameters to estimate, $$\theta_1, \theta_2, \ldots, \theta_p$$.
• e.g. Normal $$N(\mu, \sigma^2)$$. Then $$\theta = (\mu, \sigma^2)$$ and $$\hat \theta = (\bar X, S^2)$$.
• e.g. Multivariate normal, multinomial
• e.g. volatility parameters (e.g. $$\beta$$) for $$p$$ different investments
• e.g. genetic effects for $$p$$ genes on a given phenotype of interest, such as risk for a certain disease
• Can think of these as a point in $$p$$-dimensional space, called a vector $$\theta = (\theta_1, \ldots, \theta_p)$$.
• MSE still makes sense: $MSE(\hat \theta) = \sum_{j=1}^p E[(\hat \theta_i - \theta_i)^2]$
• Just add up the MSEs for each one.

#### Normal means and Stein’s paradox

• Suppose the parameters of interest are the mean of a multivariate normal $$\theta = \mu = (\mu_1, \ldots, \mu_p)$$
• Suppose $$X$$ is multivariate normal with mean $$\mu$$. So $$E[X] = \mu$$ is unbiased. What about MSE?
• If $$p = 1$$ or 2, then $$X$$ has lowest MSE…
• If $$p \geq 3$$, then $$X$$ no longer has the lowest MSE!
• This is sometimes called Stein’s paradox after Charles Stein.
• In high dimensions, it’s usually better to be biased
• If you find this very interesting there is a classic example about baseball you can read about. Summary: when estimating many players’ batting averages in the next season, instead of using each players’ average from this season as their own estimate it’s better to make all the estimates biased toward the overall average of the players.
p = 100
JS <- function(x) max((1 - (p-2)/sum(x^2)),0) * x
mu = sample(c(1:5), p, replace = TRUE)
mu
##   [1] 3 5 2 3 4 1 4 4 5 5 3 3 4 3 3 2 5 1 2 2 4 4 1 5 1 5 4 5 4 3 3 5 4 4 3
##  [36] 5 1 3 2 5 4 1 2 5 1 2 5 1 3 1 4 4 1 2 4 3 2 4 1 5 5 5 1 1 4 3 4 2 5 3
##  [71] 5 5 4 4 5 2 4 1 3 4 3 2 4 2 5 3 3 1 4 5 2 1 3 4 2 4 2 3 2 2
SEs <- replicate(10000, sum(((rnorm(p) + mu) - mu)^2))
JSSEs <- replicate(10000, sum(((JS(rnorm(p) + mu)) - mu)^2))
mean(SEs)
## [1] 99.88886
mean(JSSEs)
## [1] 92.44216
• The theme of trading off between bias and variance is something we’ll come back to later in the course.