From the course: Statistics Foundations 1: The Basics
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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…
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