Omitting Meaningless Digits in Point Estimates: The Probability Guarantee of Leading-Digit Rules
成果类型：
Article
署名作者：
Song, Wheyming T.; Schmeiser, Bruce W.
署名单位：
National Tsing Hua University; Purdue University System; Purdue University
刊物名称：
OPERATIONS RESEARCH
ISSN/ISSBN：
0030-364X
DOI：
10.1287/opre.1080.0529
发表日期：
2009
页码：
109-117
关键词：
摘要：
Motivated by the question of which point-estimator digits to report in a statistical experiment, we study the probabilistic behavior of the digits as a function of the true performance measure and the point estimator's standard error. We investigate the family of Leading-Digit Rules, which guarantees that every unreported digit has correctness probability below a given threshold. Choosing the threshold to be about 0.198 yields Yoneda's rule. The easy-to-implement rule that reports the point estimate through the leading digit of the standard error has threshold (approximately) 0.117, which is not much larger than the one-in-ten probability of a uniformly distributed random digit being correct.