Standard deviation
In: 4
Let’s look at these three sets of numbers:
A – [5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5]
B – [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
C – [0, 0, 1, 1, 5, 9, 9, 10, 10]
The average for all three of these sets is 5.
But the standard deviation for A is 0, the standard deviation for B is about 2.5, and the standard deviation for C is about 4.3.
The higher the standard deviation, the further spread out the numbers in the set are from the average.
“Deviation” comes from the word “deviate”, which means to go away from, and “standard” just means it is the standard way to measure it. “Standard deviation” is the standard way to measure how far away a set of numbers are from the set’s average.
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