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rLlZpnT02ZU
because the theta that you have over there is really-- so
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in the definition of the risk, the theta
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that you have here if you're unbiased
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is really the expectation of theta hat.
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So that's really just the variance.
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So the risk is really telling you
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how much fluctuations I have around my expectation
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if unbiased.
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But actually here, it's telling you how much fluctuations
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I have in average around theta.
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So if you understand the notion of variance as being--
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AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
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PHILIPPE RIGOLLET: What?
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AUDIENCE: Like variance on average.
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PHILIPPE RIGOLLET: No.
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AUDIENCE: No.
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PHILIPPE RIGOLLET: It's just like variance.
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AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
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PHILIPPE RIGOLLET: So when you--
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I mean, if you claim you understand what variance is,
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it's telling you what is the expected
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squared fluctuation around the expectation
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of my random variable.
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It's just telling you on average how far I'm going to be.
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And you take the square because you want to cancel the signs.
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Otherwise, you're going to get 0.
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AUDIENCE: Oh, OK.
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PHILIPPE RIGOLLET: And here it's saying, well,
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I really don't care what the expectation of theta hat is.
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What I want to get to is theta, so I'm
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looking at the expectation of the squared fluctuations
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around theta itself.
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If I'm unbiased, it coincides with the variance.
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But if I'm biased, then I have to account for the fact
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that I'm really not computing the--
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AUDIENCE: OK.
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OK.
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Thanks.
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PHILIPPE RIGOLLET: OK?
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All right.
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Are there any questions?
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So here, what I really want to illustrate
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is that the risk itself is a function
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of theta most of the times.
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And so for different thetas, some estimators
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are going to be better than others.
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But there's also the entire range
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of estimators, those that are really biased,
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but the bias can completely vanish.
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And so here, you see you have no bias,
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but the variance can be large.
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Or you have 0 bias--
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you have a bias, but the variance is 0.
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So you can actually have this trade-off
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and you can find things that are in the entire range in general.
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So those things are actually-- those trade-offs
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between bias and variance are usually much better illustrated
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if we're talking about multivariate parameters.
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If I actually look at a parameter which
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is the mean of some multivariate Gaussian, so an entire vector,
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then the bias is going to--
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I can make the bias bigger by, for example,
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forcing all the coordinates of my estimator to be the same.
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So here, I'm going to get some bias,
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but the variance is actually going
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to be much better, because I get to average all
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the coordinates for this guy.
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And so really, the bias/variance trade-off
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is when you have multiple parameters to estimate,
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so you have a vector of parameters,
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a multivariate parameter, the bias
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increases when you're trying to pull more information
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across the different components to actually have
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a lower variance.
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So the more you average, the lower the variance.
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That's exactly what we've illustrated.
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As n increases, the variance decreases,
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like 1 over n or theta, 1 minus theta over n.
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And so this is how it happens in general.
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In this class, it's mostly one-dimensional parameter
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estimation, so it's going to be a little harder to illustrate
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that.
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But if you do, for example, non-parametric estimation,
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that's all you do.
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There's just bias/variance trade-offs all the time.
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And in between, when you have high-dimensional parametric
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estimation, that happens a lot as well.
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OK.
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So I'm just going to go quickly through those two remaining
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slides, because we've actually seen them.
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But I just wanted you to have somewhere a formal definition
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of what a confidence interval is.
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And so we fixed a statistical model for n observations, X1
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to Xn.
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The parameter theta here is one-dimensional.
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Theta is a subset of the real line,
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and that's why I talk about intervals.
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An interval is a subset of the line.
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If I had a subset of R2, for example,
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that would no longer be called an interval, but a region,