Question

Is it possible to obtain a negative value for the variance or the standard deviation? Standard...

Is it possible to obtain a negative value for the variance or the standard deviation? Standard deviation and variance are measures of distance and are always greater than or equal to zero. It is therefore not possible to obtain a negative value for the variance or the standard deviation.

Homework Answers

Answer #1

No,  it is not possible to obtain a negative value for the variance or the standard deviation.

Variance of a random variable ( say X) is the sum of the square of diviation from a mean and then divide it by the total number of observations(say, n) .

Since the numerator of the variance is the sum of square values and denominator is the integer value, thus their division is positive or zero. Note that variance is equal to zero when all the values of a variable are same.

So that It is therefore not possible to obtain a negative value for the variance or the standard deviation.

Standard deviation is the positive square root of variance, so it is also equal to zero or greater than zero.

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