Guesstimation: A New Justification of the Geometric Mean Heuristic

Authors

Olga Kosheleva, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow
Vladik Kreinovich, The University of Texas at El PasoFollow

Publication Date

3-2009

Comments

Technical Report: UTEP-CS-09-10

Published in Applied Mathematical Sciences, 2009, Vol. 3, No. 47, pp. 2335-2342.

Abstract

In many practical situations in which the only information we have about the quantity x is that its value is within an interval [x,X], a reasonable estimate for this quantity is the geometric mean of the bounds, i.e., the square root of the product x*X. In this paper, we provide a new justification for this geometric mean heuristic.