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- This is a simple and, in general, non-optimal method.
- Even here---for more than one parameter---there are two versions
(a) ignore correlations (used in practice but wrong) and
(b) include correlations (best of a bad lot!). Of
course, simplicity can lead to huge savings in computer time, and so it
should not be sneered at.
- The basic idea of method of moments is simple:
Consider a set of observations
, then central
limit theorem implies
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where

- Here,
is
where
is some unknown
parameter. So putting

- gives one displaymath for
with solution
:
is the moment estimate of
.
Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu