A measure of the dispersion of a random variable or of a sample. For a random variable X, the population variance is the second moment about the population mean μ and is equal to E((X − μ)2) (see expected value). It is usually denoted by σ2 or Var(X). For a sample, the sample variance, denoted by s2, is the second moment of the data about the sample mean , but the denominator is usually taken as n − 1 rather than n in order to make it an unbiased estimator of the population variance. So
For computational purposes, notice that .