4.7 Dispersion: Standard Deviation
We now turn to standard deviation—an alternative statistical measure of dispersion that shows how much the individual data items of a collection differ from the mean. The larger the spread of the data around the mean, the larger the standard deviation. Data that has a small standard deviation is clustered tightly around the mean. Data that has a large standard deviation is more dispersed.
In mathematics, the equation for computing the standard deviation for a sample of data, usually denoted by s, is as follows:
where is the mean of the data values. Expressed in words, this equation says that we should ...
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