# Getting var(X/Y) can be hard

Thursday December 30, 2021

There generally isn't an analytic solution for the variance of the ratio of two random variables (or probability distributions). Denominators around zero are a problem, and with variance large relative to mean, the approximation using the delta method may be worse than you expect.

If you're dividing by something that can be close to zero, the results can get big, which affects variance. Dividing two standard normal distributions gives you a Cauchy distribution, for example, and the variance there is undefined. So if you're near zero, watch out! Variance may not make sense, and can at least be hard to estimate.

The approximation of the variance of a ratio using the delta method is:

$\text{var} \left( \frac{X}{Y} \right) \approx \frac{1}{\overline{Y}^2} \text{var} \left( X \right) + \frac{ \overline{X}^2 }{ \overline{Y}^4 } \text{var} \left( Y \right) - 2 \frac{ \overline{X} }{ \overline{Y}^3 } \text{cov} \left( X, Y \right)$

See Seltman for a derivation. Also presented in Kohavi et al. and Deng et al.

This is an approximation based on Taylor series expansion, and it isn't always super close, even for seemingly simple examples like this one in R, with uniform distributions:

approx_var_ratio <- function(x, y) {
(1 / mean(y)^2) * var(x) +
(mean(x)^2 / mean(y)^4) * var(y) -
2 * (mean(x) / mean(y)^3) * cov(x, y)
}

x = runif(1000, min=14, max=26)
y = runif(1000, min= 4, max=16)

approx_var_ratio(x, y)
## 0.6286227
var(x/y)
## 1.189362

That's no fluke of sampling. The delta-based formula is consistently under 60% of the empirical value, for these parameters.

It isn't just a weirdness of the uniform distribution either. The approximation is agnostic to distribution—which is another hint that it can't be perfectly right, at least not always. Here's an example with Gaussians, truncated so there's no risk of outliers near zero:

x = rtruncnorm(1000, a=14, mean=20, b=26, sd=3)
y = rtruncnorm(1000, a= 4, mean=10, b=16, sd=3)

approx_var_ratio(x, y)
## 0.3323209
var(x/y)
## 0.5294384

That's still a substantial underestimate.

The approximation gets better when means are bigger relative to variances. For example:

x = rnorm(1000, mean=200, sd=3)
y = rnorm(1000, mean=100, sd=3)

approx_var_ratio(x, y)
## 0.004369166
var(x/y)
## 0.004381438

Now it's quite close.

A distribution with appreciable mass near zero has a large variance relative to its mean, but you don't have to be near zero for the relative spread of the distribution to affect the quality of the approximation. Especially clear of zero, I think Monte Carlo estimation can be better than using the formula based on the delta method.

In conclusion, approximations are approximations. Do you really need a ratio?

Stay safe out there!