Statistics Interview Question: Why is it better to report standard deviation than variance?

Crystal X
3 min readOct 9, 2024

Statistics is perhaps the backbone of data science, so anybody wanting to excel in data science will need to attain a good understanding of the subject.

One of the first things that a person will learn when studying statistics is the measure of variability (sometimes called spread or dispersion). Two metrics that composed the measure of variability are variance and standard deviation.

Variance

Variance is a statistical measurement of the spread between numbers in a dataset. It measures how far the numbers in the dataset are from the mean, or average.

Excel has the functions VAR.S() and VAR.P(), which are used to measure the variance of either a sample or population of a dataset. .

Standard deviation

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Crystal X
Crystal X

Written by Crystal X

I have over five decades experience in the world of work, being in fast food, the military, business, non-profits, and the healthcare sector.