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In probability theory and statistics, variance is the expected value of the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The standard deviation (SD) is obtained as the square root of the variance. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure
Note that the conditional expected value is a random variable in its own right, whose value depends on the value of . Notice that the conditional expected value of given the event = is a function of (this is where adherence to the conventional and rigidly case-sensitive notation of probability theory becomes important!).
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).
Expected values can also be used to compute the variance, by means of the computational formula for the variance = [] ( []). A very important application of the expectation value is in the field of quantum mechanics .
which means that the standard deviation is equal to the square root of the difference between the average of the squares of the values and the square of the average value. See computational formula for the variance for proof, and for an analogous result for the sample standard deviation.
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.
The expected value can be thought of as a reasonable prediction of the outcomes of the random experiment (in particular, the expected value is the best constant prediction when predictions are assessed by expected squared prediction error). Thus, one interpretation of variance is that it gives the smallest possible expected squared prediction ...
The expected value of g(X) is then identified as (()) ′ = (), where the equality follows by another use of the change-of-variables formula for integration. This shows that the expected value of g ( X ) is encoded entirely by the function g and the density f of X .