Algorithms for calculating variance

Algorithms for calculating variance play a major role in computational statistics. A key difficulty in the design of good algorithms for this problem is that formulas for the variance may involve sums of squares, which can lead to numerical instability as well as to arithmetic overflow when dealing with large values. A formula for calculating the variance of an entire population of size N is: Using Bessel's correction to calculate an unbiased estimate of the population variance from a finite sample of n observations, the formula is: Therefore, a naïve algorithm to calculate the estimated variance is given by the following: Let n ← 0, Sum ← 0, SumSq ← 0 For each datum x: n ← n + 1 Sum ← Sum + x SumSq ← SumSq + x × x Var = (SumSq − (Sum × Sum) / n) / (n − 1) This algorithm can easily be adapted to compute the variance of a finite population: simply divide by n instead of n − 1 on the last line. Because SumSq and (Sum×Sum)/n can be very similar numbers, cancellation can lead to the precision of the result to be much less than the inherent precision of the floating-point arithmetic used to perform the computation. Thus this algorithm should not be used in practice, and several alternate, numerically stable, algorithms have been proposed. This is particularly bad if the standard deviation is small relative to the mean. The variance is invariant with respect to changes in a location parameter, a property which can be used to avoid the catastrophic cancellation in this formula. with any constant, which leads to the new formula the closer is to the mean value the more accurate the result will be, but just choosing a value inside the samples range will guarantee the desired stability. If the values are small then there are no problems with the sum of its squares, on the contrary, if they are large it necessarily means that the variance is large as well. In any case the second term in the formula is always smaller than the first one therefore no cancellation may occur.

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In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range. Standard deviation may be abbreviated SD, and is most commonly represented in mathematical texts and equations by the lower case Greek letter σ (sigma), for the population standard deviation, or the Latin letter s, for the sample standard deviation.

In probability theory and statistics, variance is the squared deviation from the mean of a random variable. The variance is also often defined as the square of the standard deviation. Variance is a measure of dispersion, meaning it is a measure of how far a set of numbers is spread out from their average value. It is the second central moment of a distribution, and the covariance of the random variable with itself, and it is often represented by , , , , or .

Algorithms for calculating variance

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