Samples and sample of samples
The train is about to depart. Your ticket in your hand, you check your seat number, walk in the central alley, find your seat and sit down next to another traveler. You look around to see what the other people in the wagon look like.
How many people were there in the wagon you just imagined? If you are like me, it was probably rather crowded, with few empty seats. However, according to these European data, the average occupancy rate of trains is only about 45%, so there should be more empty seats than occupied ones. What is going on?
The issue here is a simple statistical phenomenon: the sample of "all the trains you took in your life" is not quite representative of "all the trains". The occupancy rate of trains varies all the time. Some trains will be much more crowded than average, some others will be almost empty. And - guess what - the more people there are in a train, the more likely for you to be one of them. A train packed with hundreds of customers will be observed by, well, hundreds of passengers while the empty trains will not be observed at all. Thus, in your empirical sample, trains with n passengers will be over-represented n times compared to trains with only one passenger.
Here is a riddle: you want to estimate the average number of occupants in the trains that arrive to a station. To that end, you survey people leaving the station and ask how many people they saw in the same train. If you were to take the mean of your sample, the average occupancy would be over-estimated, for the reason stated above. How do you calculate the unbiased occupancy rate? Assume every train had at least one occupant (this is necessary since empty trains are never observed, so the number could be virtually anything).
We have an observed distribution Po(n) and we want to get back to the true distribution Pt(n). As we saw before:
Since:
the true distribution is
And the mean occupancy of the trains is
which turns out to be the harmonic mean of the observed sample.
Harmonic mean is typically used to average rates. The textbook example is about calculating the average speed of something: if you write down the speed of a car once per kilometer, the average speed is the harmonic mean of your sample, not the arithmetic mean. This is because the car spends less time on the kilometers that it traveled through very fast, so you need to account for that by giving less weight to those kilometers. This is in fact closely related to the train occupancy riddle: in that case, the harmonic mean gives more weight to the trains with fewer people in them, to compensate for the sampling bias.
I don't know if this statistical bias has a name (if you know, tell me in the comments). It occurs in a lot of situations. A prominent one is the fact that your average Facebook friend has more Facebook friends than average.
Consider how your Facebook friends are sampled: obviously, only people with at least one friend will appear in your sample. So all those idle accounts with no friends at all are already excluded. People with 100 friends are 10 times more likely to appear in your list than people with 10 friends. This leads to a big inflation of the average number of friends your friends have. To put it in a different way, if you have an average number of friends, it's *perfectly normal* that you have fewer friends than your friends. So there is no need to worry about it.