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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 and in particular statistical theory, unbiased estimation of a standard deviation is the calculation from a statistical sample of an estimated value of the standard deviation (a measure of statistical dispersion) of a population of values, in such a way that the expected value of the calculation equals the true value.
Firstly, while the sample variance (using Bessel's correction) is an unbiased estimator of the population variance, its square root, the sample standard deviation, is a biased estimate of the population standard deviation; because the square root is a concave function, the bias is downward, by Jensen's inequality.
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Firstly, if the true population mean is unknown, then the sample variance (which uses the sample mean in place of the true mean) is a biased estimator: it underestimates the variance by a factor of (n − 1) / n; correcting this factor, resulting in the sum of squared deviations about the sample mean divided by n-1 instead of n, is called ...
For an approximately normal data set, the values within one standard deviation of the mean account for about 68% of the set; while within two standard deviations account for about 95%; and within three standard deviations account for about 99.7%. Shown percentages are rounded theoretical probabilities intended only to approximate the empirical ...
A conventional choice is to add noise with a standard deviation of / for a sample size n; this noise is often drawn from a Student-t distribution with n-1 degrees of freedom. [47] This results in an approximately-unbiased estimator for the variance of the sample mean. [48]
The sample mean and unbiased sample variance are given by: ... where S n is the sample standard deviation of the observed values. This is equivalent to