What is the variance of {-4, 5, 8 ,-1, 0 ,4 ,-12, 4}?
1 Answer
The population variance of the data set is
Explanation:
First, let's assume that this is the entire population of values. Therefore we are looking for the population variance . If these numbers were a set of samples from a larger population, we would be looking for the sample variance which differs from the population variance by a factor of
The formula for the population variance is
where
In our population the mean is
Now we can proceed with the variance calculation: