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McKay's approximation for the coefficient of variation

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Johannes Forkman (SLU) (talk | contribs) at 08:37, 23 September 2013. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

A. T. McKay [1] derived a chi-square approximation for the coefficient of variation in normally distributed data. Let , be independent observations from a normal distribution. The population coefficient of variation is . Let and denote the sample mean and standard deviation, respectively. Then is the sample coefficient of variation. McKay’s approximation is

When is smaller than 1/3, then is approximately chi-square distributed with degrees of freedom. In the original article by McKay, the expression for looks slightly different, since McKay defined with denominator instead of . McKay's approximation, , for the coefficient of variation is approximately chi-square distributed, but exactly noncentral beta distributed [2]

References

  1. ^ McKay, A. T. (1932) Distribution of the coefficient of variation and the extended “t” distribution. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 95, 695—698
  2. ^ Forkman, Johannes; Verrill, Steve. "The distribution of McKay's approximation for the coefficient of variation" (PDF). Statistics & Probability Letters. pp. 10–14. Retrieved 2013-09-23. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)