I’ve been looking at Statistics in my free time and what exactly does standard deviation is useful for and/or how can I extract meaningful data by using SD and what conclusion can I derive from said data?
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Standard deviation measures how far away the data typically is from the mean. A larger standard deviation signifies that the data points are very spread out, while a smaller standard deviation signifies that the data are mostly near the mean.
A slightly more intuitive way to measure the spread of data is to use the “absolute mean deviation,” which is actually the mean of the deviations. You take each data point, calculate the distance it is from the mean, then average out those distances by calculating the mean of them. This will usually be close in value to the standard deviation, but the standard deviation is more commonly used because calculating it is “nicer” mathematically. That is, the standard deviation plays nicely with calculus techniques.
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