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Squared deviations from the mean (SDM) result from squaring deviations.In probability theory and statistics, the definition of variance is either the expected value of the SDM (when considering a theoretical distribution) or its average value (for actual experimental data).
If the sum of squares were not normalized, its value would always be larger for the sample of 100 people than for the sample of 20 people. To scale the sum of squares, we divide it by the degrees of freedom, i.e., calculate the sum of squares per degree of freedom, or variance. Standard deviation, in turn, is the square root of the variance.
This means that the sum of two independent normally distributed random variables is normal, with its mean being the sum of the two means, and its variance being the sum of the two variances (i.e., the square of the standard deviation is the sum of the squares of the standard deviations). [1]
This algorithm can easily be adapted to compute the variance of a finite population: simply divide by n instead of n − 1 on the last line.. Because SumSq and (Sum×Sum)/n can be very similar numbers, cancellation can lead to the precision of the result to be much less than the inherent precision of the floating-point arithmetic used to perform the computation.
The mean and the standard deviation of a set of data are descriptive statistics usually reported together. In a certain sense, the standard deviation is a "natural" measure of statistical dispersion if the center of the data is measured about the mean. This is because the standard deviation from the mean is smaller than from any other point.
Legendre's three-square theorem states which numbers can be expressed as the sum of three squares; Jacobi's four-square theorem gives the number of ways that a number can be represented as the sum of four squares. For the number of representations of a positive integer as a sum of squares of k integers, see Sum of squares function.
For this reason, describing data sets via their standard deviation or root mean square deviation is often preferred over using the variance. In the dice example the standard deviation is √ 2.9 ≈ 1.7, slightly larger than the expected absolute deviation of 1.5.
In statistical data analysis the total sum of squares (TSS or SST) is a quantity that appears as part of a standard way of presenting results of such analyses. For a set of observations, y i , i ≤ n {\displaystyle y_{i},i\leq n} , it is defined as the sum over all squared differences between the observations and their overall mean y ...