Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
The "68–95–99.7 rule" is often used to quickly get a rough probability estimate of something, given its standard deviation, if the population is assumed to be normal. It is also used as a simple test for outliers if the population is assumed normal, and as a normality test if the population is potentially not normal.
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. [6] This fact is known as the 68–95–99.7 (empirical) rule, or the 3-sigma rule.
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 standard deviation is the square root of the variance. When individual determinations of an age are not of equal significance, it is better to use a weighted mean to obtain an "average" age, as follows: x ¯ ∗ = ∑ i = 1 N w i x i ∑ i = 1 N w i . {\displaystyle {\overline {x}}^{*}={\frac {\sum _{i=1}^{N}w_{i}x_{i}}{\sum _{i=1}^{N}w_{i}}}.}
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.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
Bias in standard deviation for autocorrelated data. The figure shows the ratio of the estimated standard deviation to its known value (which can be calculated analytically for this digital filter), for several settings of α as a function of sample size n. Changing α alters the variance reduction ratio of the filter, which is known to be