Standard Deviation , Variance
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Averages do a great job of giving you a typical value in your data set, but they don’t tell you the full story
. OK, so you know where the center of your data is, but often the mean, median, and mode alone aren’t enough information to go on when you’re summarizing a data set.
The standard deviation is a measure of the dispersion, or scatter, of the data []. For instance, if a surgeon collects data for 20 patients with soft tissue sarcoma and the average tumor size in the sample is 7.4 cm, the average does not provide a good idea of the individual sizes in the sample. It could be that the sizes in the sample are similar and lie between 7 and 9 cm or that the sizes are dissimilar with some tumors being very small and others very large. In the former case, size likely will play little role in the differences in outcome between patients, whereas in the latter case tumor size could be an important factor (confounding variable) explaining differences in outcome between patients or relating to other variables such as surgical margins. Further, having an estimate of the scatter of the data is useful when comparing different studies, as even with similar averages, samples may differ greatly. It therefore is important to report the variability in the sample and this is done with the standard deviation of the sample,