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Algorithms for calculating variance play a major role in computational statistics.A key difficulty in the design of good algorithms for this problem is that formulas for the variance may involve sums of squares, which can lead to numerical instability as well as to arithmetic overflow when dealing with large values.
If the set is a sample from the whole population, then the unbiased sample variance can be calculated as 1017.538 that is the sum of the squared deviations about the mean of the sample, divided by 11 instead of 12. A function VAR.S in Microsoft Excel gives the unbiased sample variance while VAR.P is for population variance.
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).
Variance (the square of the standard deviation) – location-invariant but not linear in scale. Variance-to-mean ratio – mostly used for count data when the term coefficient of dispersion is used and when this ratio is dimensionless, as count data are themselves dimensionless, not otherwise. Some measures of dispersion have specialized purposes.
The plot of the non-parametric smoothed variance function can give the researcher an idea of the relationship between the variance and the mean. The picture to the right indicates a quadratic relationship between the mean and the variance. As we saw above, the Gamma variance function is quadratic in the mean.
Common measures of statistical dispersion are the standard deviation, variance, range, interquartile range, absolute deviation, mean absolute difference and the distance standard deviation. Measures that assess spread in comparison to the typical size of data values include the coefficient of variation.
One way of seeing that this is a biased estimator of the standard deviation of the population is to start from the result that s 2 is an unbiased estimator for the variance σ 2 of the underlying population if that variance exists and the sample values are drawn independently with replacement. The square root is a nonlinear function, and only ...
As explained above, while s 2 is an unbiased estimator for the population variance, s is still a biased estimator for the population standard deviation, though markedly less biased than the uncorrected sample standard deviation. This estimator is commonly used and generally known simply as the "sample standard deviation".