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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.
In statistics, dispersion (also called variability, scatter, or spread) is the extent to which a distribution is stretched or squeezed. [1] Common examples of measures of statistical dispersion are the variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. For instance, when the variance of data in a set is large, the data is widely scattered.
Diagram showing the cumulative distribution function for the normal distribution with mean (μ) 0 and variance (σ 2) 1. These numerical values "68%, 95%, 99.7%" come from the cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution. The prediction interval for any standard score z corresponds numerically to (1 − (1 − Φ μ,σ 2 (z)) · 2).
Standard deviation is a widely used measure of the spread or dispersion of a dataset. It quantifies the average amount of variation or deviation of individual data points from the mean of the dataset. It uses squared deviations, and has desirable properties. Standard deviation is sensitive to extreme values, making it not robust. [7]
Univariate analysis involves describing the distribution of a single variable, including its central tendency (including the mean, median, and mode) and dispersion (including the range and quartiles of the data-set, and measures of spread such as the variance and standard deviation). The shape of the distribution may also be described via ...
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.
About 68% of values drawn from a normal distribution are within one standard deviation σ from the mean; about 95% of the values lie within two standard deviations; and about 99.7% are within three standard deviations. [8] This fact is known as the 68–95–99.7 (empirical) rule, or the 3-sigma rule.
The data set [90, 100, 110] has more variability. Its standard deviation is 10 and its average is 100, giving the coefficient of variation as 10 / 100 = 0.1; The data set [1, 5, 6, 8, 10, 40, 65, 88] has still more variability. Its standard deviation is 32.9 and its average is 27.9, giving a coefficient of variation of 32.9 / 27.9 = 1.18