Median absolute deviation vs. Shamos estimator

1 · Andrey Akinshin · Feb. 1, 2022, 10:48 a.m.
There are multiple ways to estimate statistical dispersion. The standard deviation is the most popular one, but it’s not robust: a single outlier could heavily corrupt the results. Fortunately, we have robust measures of dispersions like the median absolute deviation and the Shamos estimator. In this post, we perform numerical simulations and compare these two estimators on different distributions and sample sizes....