Solved – SE of weighted mean

descriptive statisticsstandard deviationstandard errorweighted meanweighted-sampling

$X$ is a random variable with unknown distribution. A number of experiments are conducted to estimate $X$. Each experiment has a different reliability measure in estimating $X$. These $n$ experiments resulted in following sample set $\{x_1, x_2, x_3, … , x_n\}$ with corresponding non-zero weights being $\{w_1, w_2, w_3, … , w_n\}$. The higher weight corresponds to higher reliability. Note ${\sum_{i=1}^n{w_i}}$ can be greater than $1$.

The best unbiased estimator of true value of $X$ is the weighted mean of sample,
$\hat{X} = \bar{x}_w$,
where, $\bar{x}_w = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^n{w_ix_i}}{\sum_{i=1}^n{w_i}}$

The estimator for variance of $X$ from its true mean is,
$\hat{\sigma^2} = \bar{\sigma^2}_w$,
where, $\bar{\sigma^2}_w = \frac{\sum_{i=1}^n {w_i(x_i-\bar{x}_w)^2}}{\sum_{i=1}^n{w_i}}$,

What would be the best estimate of Standard Error of the sampling distribution of $\bar{x}_w$. Would it be $\frac{\bar{\sigma}_w}{\sqrt{n}}$. If yes, can someone help derive/explain it.

Best Answer

Well, under i.i.d. assumptions for the $x_i$ the variance of the weighted sample mean relative to the population variance would have a factor $\left(\sum_iw_i^2\right)/\left(\sum_iw_i\right)^2$, which reduces to $1/n$ if all of the weights are equal. And there would be a comparable substitution for the "$1-1/n$" factor on the unbiased sample variance as well. See here for example.


For explanation, we have $\bar{x}=\frac{1}{W}\sum_iw_ix_i$, where $W=\sum_iw_i$.

So then using $\mathbb{V}[\,]$ to denote variance, we have \begin{align} \mathbb{V}[\bar{x}] &= \mathbb{V}\left[\tfrac{1}{W}\sum_iw_ix_i\right] \\ &=\sum_i\mathbb{V}\left[\frac{\,w_i\,}{W}\,x_i\right] \\ &=\sum_i\left[\left(\frac{\,w_i}{W}\right)^2\,\mathbb{V}[x_i]\right] \\ &=\mathbb{V}[x]\frac{\sum_iw_i^2}{W^2} \\ \end{align}

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