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Typically when a mean is calculated it is important to know the variance and standard deviation about that mean. When a weighted mean is used, the variance of the weighted sample is different from the variance of the unweighted sample. The biased weighted sample variance ^ is defined similarly to the normal biased sample variance ^:
A weight function is a mathematical device used when performing a sum, integral, or average to give some elements more "weight" or influence on the result than other elements in the same set. The result of this application of a weight function is a weighted sum or weighted average.
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 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.
Under this assumption all formulas derived in the previous section remain valid, with the only exception that the quantile t* n−2 of Student's t distribution is replaced with the quantile q* of the standard normal distribution. Occasionally the fraction 1 / n−2 is replaced with 1 / n .
Common examples of measures of statistical dispersion are the variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. For instance, when the variance of data in a set is large, the data is widely scattered. On the other hand, when the variance is small, the data in the set is clustered.
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.
Diagram showing the cumulative distribution function for the normal distribution with mean (μ) 0 and variance (σ 2) 1. These numerical values "68%, 95%, 99.7%" come from the cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution. The prediction interval for any standard score z corresponds numerically to (1 − (1 − Φ μ,σ 2 (z)) · 2).