Bessel's correction

In statistics, Bessel's correction is the use of n − 1 instead of n in the formula for the sample variance and sample standard deviation, where n is the number of observations in a sample. This method corrects the bias in the estimation of the population variance. It also partially corrects the bias in the estimation of the population standard deviation. However, the correction often increases the mean squared error in these estimations. This technique is named after Friedrich Bessel.As a background fact, we use the identity E [ x 2 ] = μ 2 + σ 2 {displaystyle E=mu ^{2}+sigma ^{2}} which follows from the definition of the standard deviation and linearity of expectation.Recycling an identity for variance,The expected discrepancy between the biased estimator and the true variance is In statistics, Bessel's correction is the use of n − 1 instead of n in the formula for the sample variance and sample standard deviation, where n is the number of observations in a sample. This method corrects the bias in the estimation of the population variance. It also partially corrects the bias in the estimation of the population standard deviation. However, the correction often increases the mean squared error in these estimations. This technique is named after Friedrich Bessel. In estimating the population variance from a sample when the population mean is unknown, the uncorrected sample variance is the mean of the squares of deviations of sample values from the sample mean (i.e. using a multiplicative factor 1/n). In this case, the sample variance is a biased estimator of the population variance.