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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.
If the set is a sample from the whole population, then the unbiased sample variance can be calculated as 1017.538 that is the sum of the squared deviations about the mean of the sample, divided by 11 instead of 12. A function VAR.S in Microsoft Excel gives the unbiased sample variance while VAR.P is for population variance.
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
A large standard deviation indicates that the data points can spread far from the mean and a small standard deviation indicates that they are clustered closely around the mean. For example, each of the three populations {0, 0, 14, 14}, {0, 6, 8, 14} and {6, 6, 8, 8} has a mean of 7. Their standard deviations are 7, 5, and 1, respectively.
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.
Given a sample from a normal distribution, whose parameters are unknown, it is possible to give prediction intervals in the frequentist sense, i.e., an interval [a, b] based on statistics of the sample such that on repeated experiments, X n+1 falls in the interval the desired percentage of the time; one may call these "predictive confidence intervals".
A simple Monte Carlo spreadsheet calculation would reveal typical values for the standard deviation (around 105 to 115% of σ). Or, one could subtract the mean of each triplet from the values, and examine the distribution of 300 values. The mean is identically zero, but the standard deviation should be somewhat smaller (around 75 to 85% of σ).
Excel graph of the difference between two evaluations of the smallest root of a quadratic: direct evaluation using the quadratic formula (accurate at smaller b) and an approximation for widely spaced roots (accurate for larger b). The difference reaches a minimum at the large dots, and round-off causes squiggles in the curves beyond this minimum.