is a measure that is used to quantify the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data values.[1] A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the set, while a high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a wider range of values.
The standard deviation of a random variable, 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 units as the data. There are also other measures of deviation from the norm, including mean absolute deviation, which provide different mathematical properties from standard deviation.[4]