[yt-users] variance versus standard deviation

Nathan Goldbaum nathan12343 at gmail.com
Sun Jan 1 07:50:49 PST 2017


Hi Andrew,

I think the code is simply using the terms "variance" and "standard
deviation" interchangeably here.

You can see how the `variance` array attached to the profile object is
calculated here:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/src/09f0ef297d7068078a021fc8290d9e3519baf82d/yt/data_objects/profiles.py?at=yt&fileviewer=file-view-default#profiles.py-183

I haven't looked up the mathematical definitions in detail, but I believe
that this is the sample variance at each profile bin (*not* the standard
deviation of the mean).

If you'd like, please feel free to send a pull request to update that
cookbook recipe to label the variance with "variance" instead of "standard
deviation". The code for the cookbook recipe is located here in the
repository:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/src/09f0ef297d7068078a021fc8290d9e3519baf82d/doc/source/cookbook/profile_with_variance.py?at=yt&fileviewer=file-view-default

On Sun, Jan 1, 2017 at 8:30 AM Andrew Cunningham <ajcunn at gmail.com> wrote:

> In the following cookbook example:
>
> http://yt-project.org/doc/cookbook/simple_plots.html#
> profiles-with-variance-values
>
> the variance along the profile is extracted:
>
> variance = prof.variance['gas', 'velocity_magnitude'].value
>
> but is then labelled as the standard deviation when the plot is created:
>
> plt.loglog(radius, variance, label='Standard Deviation')
>
> So, does "prof.variance" return the standard deviation and not the
> variance?  Or, is the plot mislabelled?  Should the plot instead be:
>
> plt.loglog(radius, np.sqrt(variance), label='Standard Deviation')
>
>
>
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