Re:NP Complete 3rd Grade Math Problems (2018)
by mattkrause on Monday August 30, 2021 @08:38PM
(#28362705)
Yes, that's obviously how the math works out.
Both the overall mean and mean-of-means have sensible interpretations though.
Suppose you observe a random sample of stars and find their temperatures to be 6000, 6250, 6750, and 7000C. The best possible guess[0] for the temperature of a new star drawn from that population is 6500C. The average temperature of all the starstuff may be different if one star is larger than another, but that's an answer to a slightly different question.
In fact, I would argue that the mean-of-means is often a more appropriate summary statistic than the overall mean of the observations when there are repeated measurements.
[0] Under L2 loss, with no prior, etc etc
> the subsamples have the same number of data points
It's unlikely to be useful in any other situation. Certainly not for averaging the temperature of a galaxy.