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The STANDARD-DEVIATION Function

The STANDARD-DEVIATION function returns a numeric value that approximates the standard deviation of its arguments. The type of this function is numeric.

General Format


*

Arguments

  1. Argument-1 must be class numeric.

Returned Values

  1. The returned value is the approximation of the standard deviation of the argument-1 series.
  2. The returned value is calculated as follows:
    1. The difference between each argument-1 value and the arithmetic mean of the argument-1 series is calculated and squared.
    2. The values obtained are added. This quantity is divided by the number of values in the argument-1 series.
    3. The square root of the quotient obtained is calculated. The returned value is the absolute value of this square root.
  3. If the argument-1 series consists of only one value, or if the argument-1 series consists of all variable occurrence data items and the total number of occurrences for all of them is one, the returned value is zero.
  4. Floating-point format is used for numeric non-integer results.
Parent topic: Definitions of Functions