This is a re-release of an episode that was originally released on February 26, 2017.

When you're estimating something about some object that's a member of a  larger group of similar objects (say, the batting average of a baseball  player, who belongs to a baseball team), how should you estimate it: use  measurements of the individual, or get some extra information from the  group?  The James-Stein estimator tells you how to combine individual  and group information make predictions that, taken over the whole group,  are more accurate than if you treated each individual, well,  individually.

Stein's Paradox

Linear Digressions