What is the statistics.pstdev() method in Python?
Overview
The statistics.pstdev() method in Python returns the population standard deviation. This method is unlike the statistics.stdev() method, which only calculates the standard deviation from a sample of data, and instead calculates the standard deviation of an entire population.
Standard deviation is simply the square root of variance or the sample variance and is found by:
standard deviation = √variance
Syntax
statistics.pstdev(data, xbar)
Parameter value
Parameter | Function |
| This is a required argument. It is the data to be used. It can be a list, a sequence, or an iterator. |
| This is an optional argument. It is the mean of the data provided. If the value is not provided, by default, Python calculates the mean of the data. |
Return value
The statistics.pstdev() method returns a float value, which represents the population standard deviation of a given data.
Code example
Let’s use the statistics.pstdev() method to calculate the population standard deviation for the given data.
import statistics# creating a data setdata = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]# to obtain the population standard deviationp_standard_deviation = statistics.pstdev(data)print('The population standard deviation is', p_standard_deviation)
Code explanation
- Line 1: We imported the
statisticsmodule. - Line 4: We created a data set we called
data. - Line 6: We used the
statistics.pstdev()method to obtain the population standard deviation of thedatavariable and assigned the value to another variable,p_standard_deviation. - Line 7: We printed
p_standard_deviation, which contains the population standard deviation of the given data.