An estimator for the mean that dominates the empirical average

We propose a simple empirical representation of expectations such that: For a number of samples above a certain threshold, drawn from any probability distribution with finite fourth-order statistic, the proposed estimator outperforms the empirical average when tested against the actual population, with respect to the quadratic loss. For datasets smaller than this threshold, the result still holds, but for a class of distributions determined by their first four statistics. Our approach leverages the duality between distributionally robust and risk-averse optimization.