Shrinkage (statistics)

In statistics, shrinkage is the reduction in the effects of sampling variation. In regression analysis, a fitted relationship appears to perform less well on a new data set than on the data set used for fitting. In particular the value of the coefficient of determination 'shrinks'. This idea is complementary to overfitting and, separately, to the standard adjustment made in the coefficient of determination to compensate for the subjunctive effects of further sampling, like controlling for the potential of new explanatory terms improving the model by chance: that is, the adjustment formula itself provides "shrinkage." But the adjustment formula yields an artificial shrinkage. A shrinkage estimator is an estimator that, either explicitly or implicitly, incorporates the effects of shrinkage. In loose terms this means that a naive or raw estimate is improved by combining it with other information. The term relates to the notion that the improved estimate is made closer to the value supplied by the 'other information' than the raw estimate. In this sense, shrinkage is used to regularize ill-posed inference problems. Shrinkage is implicit in Bayesian inference and penalized likelihood inference, and explicit in James–Stein-type inference. In contrast, simple types of maximum-likelihood and least-squares estimation procedures do not include shrinkage effects, although they can be used within shrinkage estimation schemes. Many standard estimators can be improved, in terms of mean squared error (MSE), by shrinking them towards zero (or any other fixed constant value). In other words, the improvement in the estimate from the corresponding reduction in the width of the confidence interval can outweigh the worsening of the estimate introduced by biasing the estimate towards zero (see bias-variance tradeoff). Assume that the expected value of the raw estimate is not zero and consider other estimators obtained by multiplying the raw estimate by a certain parameter. A value for this parameter can be specified so as to minimize the MSE of the new estimate.