Definition
Failure of averaging refers to the situation in which the behavior generated using the average of a set of measurements is not representative of the behavior of the measured population. Averaging fails when the set of parameters describing a system occupies a strongly concave-shaped region in the parameter space, so that the centroid of the distribution of measured parameters does not lie within the distribution itself. Failures of averaging may result either when individual parameters have multimodal distributions or when multiple parameters are correlated in such a manner that their joint distribution is concave. In the latter case, failure of averaging may be difficult to detect experimentally if the set of parameters whose correlations lead to failure of averaging cannot be measured simultaneously.
Detailed Description
Background and Overview
A common technique throughout the sciences is to pool data over many trials or samples and compute the average. This is commonly...
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Goldman, M.S. (2014). Failure of Averaging. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_15-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_15-1
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