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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.
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).
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 ...
A disadvantage of the variance for practical applications is that, unlike the standard deviation, its units differ from the random variable, which is why the standard deviation is more commonly reported as a measure of dispersion once the calculation is finished. Another disadvantage is that the variance is not finite for many distributions.
Since the square root introduces bias, the terminology "uncorrected" and "corrected" is preferred for the standard deviation estimators: s n is the uncorrected sample standard deviation (i.e., without Bessel's correction) s is the corrected sample standard deviation (i.e., with Bessel's correction), which is less biased, but still biased
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]
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]
Physical scientists often use the term root mean square as a synonym for standard deviation when it can be assumed the input signal has zero mean, that is, referring to the square root of the mean squared deviation of a signal from a given baseline or fit. [8] [9] This is useful for electrical engineers in calculating the "AC only" RMS of a signal.