bessel's correction
Given a sample, we want to find the population variance. Naively, we might want to find the Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the variance as \[ \frac{(x_i - \bar{x})^2}{n} \] where \(\bar{x}\) is the sample mean.
But this is actually a biased estimator.
1. see also
- degrees of freedom
- student's t test – the formulas involve degrees of freedom, for which a similar correction is relevant