Does anyone know a method or a test that can be used to test changes in variance? Or is there a statistical measure for this? I have data at three measurement times from two groups. I have already tested the mean differences with an ANOVA, but I noticed that the variance in the first group increases a lot towards the third measurement time.
Thank you and best regards!
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I'm working on a simple project in which I'm trying to describe the relationship between two positively correlated variables and determine if that relationship is changing over time, and if so, to what degree. I feel like this is something people probably do pretty often, but maybe I'm just not using the correct terminology because google isn't helping me very much.
I've plotted the variables on a scatter plot and know how to determine the correlation coefficient and plot a linear regression. I thought this may be a good first step because the linear regression tells me what I can expect y to be for a given x value. This means I can quantify how "far away" each data point is from the regression line (I think this is called the squared error?). Now I'd like to see what the error looks like for each data point over time. For example, if I have 100 data points and the most recent 20 are much farther away from where the regression line/function says it should be, maybe I could say that the relationship between the variables is showing signs of changing? Does that make any sense at all or am I way off base?
I have a suspicion that there is a much simpler way to do this and/or that I'm going about it in the wrong way. I'd appreciate any guidance you can offer!
I can suggest two strands of literature that study changing relationships over time. Typing these names into google should provide you with a large number of references so I'll stick to more concise descriptions.
(1) Structural break modelling. As the name suggest, this assumes that there has been a sudden change in parameters (e.g. a correlation coefficient). This is applicable if there has been a policy change, change in measurement device, etc. The estimation approach is indeed very close to the procedure you suggest. Namely, you would estimate the squared error (or some other measure of fit) on the full sample and the two sub-samples (before and after break). If the gains in fit are large when dividing the sample, then you would favour the model with the break and use different coefficients before and after the structural change.
(2) Time-varying coefficient models. This approach is more subtle as coefficients will now evolve more slowly over time. These changes can originate from the time evolution of some observed variables or they can be modeled through some unobserved latent process. In the latter case the estimation typically involves the use of state-space models (and thus the Kalman filter or some more advanced filtering techniques).
I hope this helps!
I am trying to implement an A/B testing (online validation) for ML model that has a highly imbalanced positive event rate. For example, the model detects spam and only 1 out of 1000 samples is spam, or baseline click through rate is very low <0.1%
I know one issues is that I will need very large samples in each control and treatment cohort. Are there other issues that I need to be aware of? Will the statistical properties breakdown? What are the ways to counter them?
Thanks.
You can use a calculator like the one here to get a sense for volumes needed. How much of a difference are you expecting? Eg. Detecting a 1% improvement that’s statistically significant requires way more samples than if you’re looking to detect a 30% improvement.
https://www.statsig.com/calculator
I'm trying to work out how to solve what seems like a simple problem, but I can't convince myself of the correct method.
I have time-series data that represents the pdf of a Power output (P), varying over time, also the cdf and quantile functions - f(P,t), F(P,t) and q(p,t). I need to find the pdf, cdf and quantile function for the Energy in a given time interval [t1,t2] from this data - say e(), E(), and qe().
Clearly energy is the integral of the power over [t1,t2], but how do I best calculate e, E and qe ?
My best guess is that since q(p,t) is a power, I should generate qe by integrating q over the time interval, and then calculate the other distributions from that.
Is it as simple as that, or do I need to get to grips with stochastic calculus ?
Additional details for clarification
The data we're getting is a time-series of 'black-box' forecasts for f(P), F(P),q(P) for each time t, where P is the instantaneous power and there will be around 100 forecasts for the interval I'd like to get the e(P) for. By 'Black-box' I mean that there will be a function I can call to evaluate f,F,q for P, but I don't know the underlying distribution.
The black-box functions are almost certainly interpolating output data from the model that produces the power forecasts, but we don't have access to that. I would guess that it won't be anything straightforward, since it comes from a chain of non-linear transformations. It's actually wind farm production forecasts: the wind speeds may be normally distributed, but multiple terrain and turbine transformations will change that.
Further clarification
(I've edited the original text to remove confusing variable names in the energy distribution functions.)
The forecasts will be provided as follows:
The interval [t1,t2] that we need e, E and qe for is sub-divided into 100 (say) sub-intervals k=1...100. For each k we are given a distinct f(P), call them f_k(P). We need to calculate the energy distributions for the interval from this set of f_k(P).
Thanks for the clarification. From what I can tell, you don't have enough information to solve this problem properly. Specifically, you need to have some estimate of the dependence of power from one time step to the next. The longer the time step, the less the dependence; if the steps are long enough, power might be approximately independent from one step to the next, which would be good news because that would simplify the analysis quite a bit. So, how long are the time steps? An hour? A minute? A day?
If the time steps are long enough to be independent, the distribution of energy is the distribution of 100 variables, which will be very nearly normally distributed by the central limit theorem. It's easy to work out the mean and variance of the total energy in this case.
Otherwise, the distribution will be some more complicated result. My guess is that the variance as estimated by the independent-steps approach will be too big -- the actual variance would be somewhat less, I believe.
From what you say, you don't have any information about temporal dependence. Maybe you can find or derive from some other source or sources an estimate the autocorrelation function -- I wouldn't be surprised if that question has already been studied for wind power. I also wouldn't be surprised if a general version of this problem has already been studied -- perhaps you can search for something like "distribution of a sum of autocorrelated variables." You might get some interest in that question on stats.stackexchange.com.
I'm trying to find confidence intervals for the means of various variables in a database using SPSS, and I've run into a spot of trouble.
The data is weighted, because each of the people who was surveyed represents a different portion of the overall population. For example, one young man in our sample might represent 28000 young men in the general population. The problem is that SPSS seems to think that the young man's database entries each represent 28000 measurements when they actually just represent one, and this makes SPSS think we have much more data than we actually do. As a result SPSS is giving very very low standard error estimates and very very narrow confidence intervals.
I've tried fixing this by dividing every weight value by the mean weight. This gives plausible figures and an average weight of 1, but I'm not sure the resulting numbers are actually correct.
Is my approach sound? If not, what should I try?
I've been using the Explore command to find mean and standard error (among other things), in case it matters.
You do need to scale weights to the actual sample size, but only the procedures in the Complex Samples option are designed to account for sampling weights properly. The regular weight variable in Statistics is treated as a frequency weight.
I have set of 200 data rows(implies a small set of data). I want to carry out some statistical analysis, but before that I want to exclude outliers.
What are the potential algos for the purpose? Accuracy is a matter of concern.
I am very new to Stats, so need help in very basic algos.
Overall, the thing that makes a question like this hard is that there is no rigorous definition of an outlier. I would actually recommend against using a certain number of standard deviations as the cutoff for the following reasons:
A few outliers can have a huge impact on your estimate of standard deviation, as standard deviation is not a robust statistic.
The interpretation of standard deviation depends hugely on the distribution of your data. If your data is normally distributed then 3 standard deviations is a lot, but if it's, for example, log-normally distributed, then 3 standard deviations is not a lot.
There are a few good ways to proceed:
Keep all the data, and just use robust statistics (median instead of mean, Wilcoxon test instead of T-test, etc.). Probably good if your dataset is large.
Trim or Winsorize your data. Trimming means removing the top and bottom x%. Winsorizing means setting the top and bottom x% to the xth and 1-xth percentile value respectively.
If you have a small dataset, you could just plot your data and examine it manually for implausible values.
If your data looks reasonably close to normally distributed (no heavy tails and roughly symmetric), then use the median absolute deviation instead of the standard deviation as your test statistic and filter to 3 or 4 median absolute deviations away from the median.
Start by plotting the leverage of the outliers and then go for some good ol' interocular trauma (aka look at the scatterplot).
Lots of statistical packages have outlier/residual diagnostics, but I prefer Cook's D. You can calculate it by hand if you'd like using this formula from mtsu.edu (original link is dead, this is sourced from archive.org).
You may have heard the expression 'six sigma'.
This refers to plus and minus 3 sigma (ie, standard deviations) around the mean.
Anything outside the 'six sigma' range could be treated as an outlier.
On reflection, I think 'six sigma' is too wide.
This article describes how it amounts to "3.4 defective parts per million opportunities."
It seems like a pretty stringent requirement for certification purposes. Only you can decide if it suits you.
Depending on your data and its meaning, you might want to look into RANSAC (random sample consensus). This is widely used in computer vision, and generally gives excellent results when trying to fit data with lots of outliers to a model.
And it's very simple to conceptualize and explain. On the other hand, it's non deterministic, which may cause problems depending on the application.
Compute the standard deviation on the set, and exclude everything outside of the first, second or third standard deviation.
Here is how I would go about it in SQL Server
The query below will get the average weight from a fictional Scale table holding a single weigh-in for each person while not permitting those who are overly fat or thin to throw off the more realistic average:
select w.Gender, Avg(w.Weight) as AvgWeight
from ScaleData w
join ( select d.Gender, Avg(d.Weight) as AvgWeight,
2*STDDEVP(d.Weight) StdDeviation
from ScaleData d
group by d.Gender
) d
on w.Gender = d.Gender
and w.Weight between d.AvgWeight-d.StdDeviation
and d.AvgWeight+d.StdDeviation
group by w.Gender
There may be a better way to go about this, but it works and works well. If you have come across another more efficient solution, I’d love to hear about it.
NOTE: the above removes the top and bottom 5% of outliers out of the picture for purpose of the Average. You can adjust the number of outliers removed by adjusting the 2* in the 2*STDDEVP as per: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
If you want to just analyse it, say you want to compute the correlation with another variable, its ok to exclude outliers. But if you want to model / predict, it is not always best to exclude them straightaway.
Try to treat it with methods such as capping or if you suspect the outliers contain information/pattern, then replace it with missing, and model/predict it. I have written some examples of how you can go about this here using R.