Full name
statistics.stdev
Library
statistics
Syntax
statistics.stdev(data, xbar=None)
Description
The statistics.stdev function returns the standard deviation of the sample made up of the elements in data.
Parameters
- data: Iterable for whose elements you want to obtain the standard deviation.
- xbar: Optional argument. Value from which deviations are calculated. If omitted, they are obtained with respect to the mean value of the data.
Result
The statistics.stdev function returns a value of type float.
Examples
We can obtain the standard deviation of the values of a list with the following code:
statistics.stdev([1, 3, 3, 6])
2.0615528128088303
In this second example we are going to generate a list made up of a thousand random values extracted from a Gaussian distribution with mean 5 and standard deviation 1:
import random
y = [random.gauss(5, 1) for _ in range(1000)]
Let's show the histogram:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize = (8, 4))
plt.hist(y, bins = 10)
plt.grid()
plt.show()
plt.hist(y, bins = 10)
plt.grid()
plt.show()
Now, let's get its standard deviation below:
statistics.stdev(y)
0.9833665711568007
If we specify as argument xbar the value 10, the deviations will be calculated with respect to this value:
statistics.stdev(y, xbar = 10)
5.0807165108646615
