The sample mean is often used to aggregate different unbiased estimates of a parameter, producing a final estimate that is unbiased but possibly high-variance. This paper introduces the Bayesian median of means, an aggregation rule that roughly interpolates between the sample mean and median, resulting in estimates with much smaller variance at the expense of bias. While the procedure is non-parametric, its squared bias is asymptotically negligible relative to the variance, similar to maximum likelihood estimators. The Bayesian median of means is consistent, and concentration bounds for the estimator's bias and @math error are derived, as well as a fast non-randomized approximating algorithm. The performances of both the exact and the approximate procedures match that of the sample mean in low-variance settings, and exhibit much better results in high-variance scenarios. The empirical performances are examined in real and simulated data, and in applications such as importance sampling, cross-validation and bagging.
In fact, the median of means itself can be cast as a computation compromise on the celebrated Hodges-Lehmann estimator proposed in @cite_12 : Many theoretical properties are known about it; for instance, it has an asymptotic breakdown point of @math , meaning a contamination of up to @math _1, , _n @math P$-means ( @cite_18 ).
@cite_18 @cite_12
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This article offers a simplified approach to the distribution theory of randomly weighted averages or @math -means @math , for a sequence of i.i.d.random variables @math , and independent random weights @math with @math and @math . The collection of distributions of @math , indexed by distributions of @math , is shown to encode Kingman's partition structure derived from @math . For instance, if @math has Bernoulli @math distribution on @math , the @math th moment of @math is a polynomial function of @math which equals the probability generating function of the number @math of distinct values in a sample of size @math from @math : @math . This elementary identity illustrates a general moment formula for @math -means in terms of the partition structure associated with random samples from @math , first developed by Diaconis and Kemperman (1996) and Kerov (1998) in terms of random permutations. As shown by Tsilevich (1997) if the partition probabilities factorize in a way characteristic of the generalized Ewens sampling formula with two parameters @math , found by Pitman (1992), then the moment formula yields the Cauchy-Stieltjes transform of an @math mean. The analysis of these random means includes the characterization of @math -means, known as Dirichlet means, due to Von Neumann (1941), Watson (1956) and Cifarelli and Regazzini (1990) and generalizations of L 'evy's arcsine law for the time spent positive by a Brownian motion, due to Darling (1949) Lamperti (1958) and Barlow, Pitman and Yor (1989). A serious objection to many of the classical statistical methods based on linear models or normality assumptions is their vulnerability to gross errors. For certain testing problems this difficulty is suc-cessfully overcome by rank tests such as the two Wilcoxon tests or the Kruskal- Wallis H-test. Their power is more robust against gross errors than that of the t- and F-tests, and their efficiency loss is quite small even in the rare case in which the suspicion of the possibility of gross errors is unfounded.