From the course: Statistics Foundations 1: The Basics
Join today to access over 23,200 courses taught by industry experts.
Big and small standard deviation - Microsoft Excel Tutorial
From the course: Statistics Foundations 1: The Basics
Big and small standard deviation
- [Narrator] One dataset has a standard deviation of 20. Another, a standard deviation of 200. Which of these datasets has less variation? The answer is that it really depends. First, consider what you're actually measuring. A standard deviation of 20 degrees Celsius for daily high temperatures in Paris for one summer, it'd be huge. But a standard deviation of $200 for the annual salaries of teachers across the country would not be as significant. In those examples, we were considering the dataset as a whole. But standard deviation is also used to investigate individual data points. For example, suppose a data scientist has an annual salary of $200,000. But the mean is $100,000, and the standard deviation is $50,000. We might say that they are two standard deviations above the mean. A data scientist that makes $50,000 per year is one standard deviation below the mean. As you can see, standard deviation can be a…
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.