Question

What is the easiest method to cal ulage standard deviation?

Answer 1

The easiest would be calculating the average of the distance between each data point and the mean.

Explanation:

However, if you calculate that directly, you would end up with zero. To get around this, we calculate the square of the distance, get the average, then square root to get back the original scale.

If data is `x_i`, `i` is from 1 to n, (`x_1, x_2, ....., x_n`) and the average is `bar x`, then

Std dev = `sqrt ( (sum (x_i - bar x)^2)/n)`