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Statistics vocabulary · Descriptive Statistics

Variance

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/ˈveriəns/nounCore term

In statistics, variance means: The average of the squared distances between each value and the mean; it measures spread, and its square root is the standard deviation.

In Turkish: varyans

How it is used

Used more in theory and in methods such as ANOVA than in everyday reporting, because its units are squared. For a sample, the sum of squares is divided by n − 1 instead of n. People also say a variable 'explains' or 'accounts for' a share of the variance.

Example sentences

  1. Age alone accounts for 18% of the variance in blood pressure.

  2. Levene's test showed that the variances of the two groups were not equal.

Common collocations

  • explain the variance
  • sample variance
  • equal variances
  • proportion of variance
  • analysis of variance
  • standard deviationA measure of how spread out values are around the mean; a small value means the data sit close to the mean, a large one means they are widely scattered.
  • ANOVAShort for analysis of variance: a family of tests that compare the means of three or more groups at once by comparing variation between the groups with variation within them.
  • R-squaredThe share of the variation in the outcome variable that a regression model explains, ranging from 0 to 1; also called the coefficient of determination.
  • meanThe sum of all the values divided by the number of values; the usual 'average' that describes the centre of a set of numbers.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Descriptive Statistics

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