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This algorithm can easily be adapted to compute the variance of a finite population: simply divide by n instead of n − 1 on the last line.. Because SumSq and (Sum×Sum)/n can be very similar numbers, cancellation can lead to the precision of the result to be much less than the inherent precision of the floating-point arithmetic used to perform the computation.
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). Computations for analysis of variance involve the partitioning of a sum of SDM.
An advantage of variance as a measure of dispersion is that it is more amenable to algebraic manipulation than other measures of dispersion such as the expected absolute deviation; for example, the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables is equal to the sum of their variances. A disadvantage of the variance for practical applications ...
To illustrate, a simple example of this process is to find the mean and variance of the derived quantity z = x 2 where the measured quantity x is Normally distributed with mean μ and variance σ 2. The derived quantity z will have some new PDF, that can (sometimes) be found using the rules of probability calculus. [ 7 ]
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.
The following table gives the expected values of some commonly occurring probability distributions. The third column gives the expected values both in the form immediately given by the definition, as well as in the simplified form obtained by computation therefrom.
which is an unbiased estimator of the variance of the mean in terms of the observed sample variance and known quantities. If the autocorrelations are identically zero, this expression reduces to the well-known result for the variance of the mean for independent data. The effect of the expectation operator in these expressions is that the ...
In statistics, the variance function is a smooth function that depicts the variance of a random quantity as a function of its mean.The variance function is a measure of heteroscedasticity and plays a large role in many settings of statistical modelling.