Variance

statistics

Variance

Variance measures how far a set of numbers is spread out from their mean. It is the average of the squared differences from the mean. A high variance indicates a large spread of the numbers in the dataset.

$${\sigma }^2=\frac{1}{n}\sum _{i=1}^n{\left({\mathbf{x}}_i-{\mu }_{\mathbf{x}}\right)}^2$$

where $n$ is the number of elements in the population $\mathbf{x}$ and ${\mu }_{\mathbf{x}}$ is the mean of the population.