standard deviation

standard deviation
a measure of dispersion in a frequency distribution, equal to the square root of the mean of the squares of the deviations from the arithmetic mean of the distribution.
[1920-25]

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      in statistics, a measure of the variability (dispersion or spread) of any set of numerical values about their arithmetic mean (average; denoted by μ). It is specifically defined as the positive square root of the variance2); in symbols, σ2 = Σ(xi − μ)2/n, where Σ is a compact notation used to indicate that as the index (i) changes from 1 to n (the number of elements in the data set), the square of the difference between each element xi and the mean, divided by n, is calculated and these values are added together.

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Universalium. 2010.

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