In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values.[1] A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the values are spread out over a wider range.
Standard deviation may be abbreviated SD, and is most commonly represented in mathematical texts and equations by the lower case Greek letter sigma σ, for the population standard deviation, or the Latin letter s, for the sample standard deviation.
The standard deviation of a random variable, sample, statistical population, data set, or probability distribution is the square root of its variance. It is algebraically simpler, though in practice less robust, than the average absolute deviation.[2][3] A useful property of the standard deviation is that, unlike the variance, it is expressed in the same unit as the data.