The concepts of bias, precision and accuracy, and their use in testing the performance of species richness estimators, with a literature review of estimator performance

The purpose of this review is to clarify the concepts of bias, precision and accuracy as they are commonly defined in the biostatistical literature, with our focus on the use of these concepts in quantitatively testing the performance of point estimators (specifically species richness estimators). We first describe the general concepts underlying bias, precision and accuracy, and then describe a number of commonly used unscaled and scaled performance measures of bias, precision and accuracy (e.g. mean error, variance, standard deviation, mean square error, root mean square error, mean absolute error, and all their scaled counterparts) which may be used to evaluate estimator performance. We also provide…