- ML - Home
- ML - Introduction
- ML - Getting Started
- ML - Basic Concepts
- ML - Ecosystem
- ML - Python Libraries
- ML - Applications
- ML - Life Cycle
- ML - Required Skills
- ML - Implementation
- ML - Challenges & Common Issues
- ML - Limitations
- ML - Reallife Examples
- ML - Data Structure
- ML - Mathematics
- ML - Artificial Intelligence
- ML - Neural Networks
- ML - Deep Learning
- ML - Getting Datasets
- ML - Categorical Data
- ML - Data Loading
- ML - Data Understanding
- ML - Data Preparation
- ML - Models
- ML - Supervised Learning
- ML - Unsupervised Learning
- ML - Semi-supervised Learning
- ML - Reinforcement Learning
- ML - Supervised vs. Unsupervised
- Machine Learning Data Visualization
- ML - Data Visualization
- ML - Histograms
- ML - Density Plots
- ML - Box and Whisker Plots
- ML - Correlation Matrix Plots
- ML - Scatter Matrix Plots
- Statistics for Machine Learning
- ML - Statistics
- ML - Mean, Median, Mode
- ML - Standard Deviation
- ML - Percentiles
- ML - Data Distribution
- ML - Skewness and Kurtosis
- ML - Bias and Variance
- ML - Hypothesis
- Regression Analysis In ML
- ML - Regression Analysis
- ML - Linear Regression
- ML - Simple Linear Regression
- ML - Multiple Linear Regression
- ML - Polynomial Regression
- Classification Algorithms In ML
- ML - Classification Algorithms
- ML - Logistic Regression
- ML - K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN)
- ML - Naïve Bayes Algorithm
- ML - Decision Tree Algorithm
- ML - Support Vector Machine
- ML - Random Forest
- ML - Confusion Matrix
- ML - Stochastic Gradient Descent
- Clustering Algorithms In ML
- ML - Clustering Algorithms
- ML - Centroid-Based Clustering
- ML - K-Means Clustering
- ML - K-Medoids Clustering
- ML - Mean-Shift Clustering
- ML - Hierarchical Clustering
- ML - Density-Based Clustering
- ML - DBSCAN Clustering
- ML - OPTICS Clustering
- ML - HDBSCAN Clustering
- ML - BIRCH Clustering
- ML - Affinity Propagation
- ML - Distribution-Based Clustering
- ML - Agglomerative Clustering
- Dimensionality Reduction In ML
- ML - Dimensionality Reduction
- ML - Feature Selection
- ML - Feature Extraction
- ML - Backward Elimination
- ML - Forward Feature Construction
- ML - High Correlation Filter
- ML - Low Variance Filter
- ML - Missing Values Ratio
- ML - Principal Component Analysis
- Reinforcement Learning
- ML - Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
- ML - Exploitation & Exploration
- ML - Q-Learning
- ML - REINFORCE Algorithm
- ML - SARSA Reinforcement Learning
- ML - Actor-critic Method
- ML - Monte Carlo Methods
- ML - Temporal Difference
- Deep Reinforcement Learning
- ML - Deep Reinforcement Learning
- ML - Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
- ML - Deep Q-Networks
- ML - Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient
- ML - Trust Region Methods
- Quantum Machine Learning
- ML - Quantum Machine Learning
- ML - Quantum Machine Learning with Python
- Machine Learning Miscellaneous
- ML - Performance Metrics
- ML - Automatic Workflows
- ML - Boost Model Performance
- ML - Gradient Boosting
- ML - Bootstrap Aggregation (Bagging)
- ML - Cross Validation
- ML - AUC-ROC Curve
- ML - Grid Search
- ML - Data Scaling
- ML - Train and Test
- ML - Association Rules
- ML - Apriori Algorithm
- ML - Gaussian Discriminant Analysis
- ML - Cost Function
- ML - Bayes Theorem
- ML - Precision and Recall
- ML - Adversarial
- ML - Stacking
- ML - Epoch
- ML - Perceptron
- ML - Regularization
- ML - Overfitting
- ML - P-value
- ML - Entropy
- ML - MLOps
- ML - Data Leakage
- ML - Monetizing Machine Learning
- ML - Types of Data
- Machine Learning - Resources
- ML - Quick Guide
- ML - Cheatsheet
- ML - Interview Questions
- ML - Useful Resources
- ML - Discussion
Machine Learning - Standard Deviation
Standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of data values around their mean. In machine learning, it is an important statistical concept that is used to describe the spread or distribution of a dataset.
Standard deviation is calculated as the square root of the variance, which is the average of the squared differences from the mean. The formula for calculating standard deviation is as follows −
$$\sigma =\sqrt{\left [\Sigma \left ( x-\mu \right )^{2}/N \right ]}$$
Where −
$\sigma$is the standard deviation
$\Sigma$ is the sum of
$x$ is the data point
$\mu$ is the mean of the dataset
$N$ is the total number of data points
In machine learning, standard deviation is used to understand the variability of a dataset and to detect outliers. For example, in finance, standard deviation is used to measure the volatility of stock prices. In image processing, standard deviation can be used to detect image noise.
Types of Examples
Example 1
In this example, we will be using the NumPy library to calculate the standard deviation −
import numpy as np
data = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
std_dev = np.std(data)
print('Standard deviation:', std_dev)
Output
It will produce the following output −
Standard deviation: 1.707825127659933
Example 2
Let's see another example in which we will calculate the standard deviation of each column in Iris flower dataset using Python and Pandas library −
import pandas as pd
# load the iris dataset
iris_df = pd.read_csv('https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learningdatabases/iris/iris.data',
names=['sepal length', 'sepal width', 'petal length', 'petal width', 'class'])
# calculate the standard deviation of each column
std_devs = iris_df.std()
# print the standard deviations
print('Standard deviations:')
print(std_devs)
In this example, we load the Iris dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository using Pandas' read_csv() method. We then calculate the standard deviation of each column using the std() method of the Pandas dataframe. Finally, we print the standard deviations for each column.
Output
On executing the code, you will get the following output −
Standard deviations: sepal length 0.828066 sepal width 0.433594 petal length 1.764420 petal width 0.763161 dtype: float64
This example demonstrates how standard deviation can be used to understand the variability of a dataset. In this case, we can see that the standard deviation of the 'petal length' column is much higher than that of the other columns, which suggests that this feature may be more variable and potentially more informative for classification tasks.