ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Newey–West estimator

So imagine you and your friends are playing with a ball but sometimes you accidentally throw it too hard and it goes really far away from where it’s supposed to go. This is kind of like what happens when we try to measure things in statistics. Sometimes our measurements aren’t perfect and there could be a lot of reasons for this.

The Newey-West estimator helps us fix this problem when we’re looking at data over time. Let’s say we’re trying to measure how much a certain city’s population grows every year. We might expect the population to grow by about the same amount every year, but sometimes there are things that happen unexpectedly, like a recession or a natural disaster, that would cause the population to grow more or less than we expected.

The Newey-West estimator takes into account these unexpected things by adjusting our measurements in a way that makes sense. It helps us look at the data in such a way that we can more accurately estimate what the actual population growth has been over time.

So basically, the Newey-West estimator helps us make more accurate measurements of things when we’re looking at data over time, even if there are unexpected things that happen which might throw off our measurements.