Re: What is standard deviation?

From Stanford Wong's BJ21

Posted by Bisser on 8 Oct 1997, at 4:33 p.m., in response to What is standard deviation?, posted by hi! on 8 Oct 1997, at 3:09 p.m.


Hi Hi:

Just in case Curios Amateur is too mathematical for you...

Let us consider a bunch of numbers, which are formally called data. The standard devation is a measure of the spread of the data. For example, the numbers 3,7,1,17,2 are more spread out (scattered) than the numbers 5,6,6,7,6. Both sets of data have mean 6, but the first one has higher standard deviation. Thus low standard deviation indicates that the data were generated by a very consistent process, while high standard deviation implies great difference from case to case.

See Curios Amateur's post for the exact definition. Also, you will find definition and discussion in any elementary statistics textbook.

Bisser

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