CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rmeanvariance
CafféSospeso
CafféSospeso

Reputation: 1188

Compare variances between two populations with different means

I would like to compare two populations which have different means. I want to find a way to compare their variances, to have an idea of which of the two populations have values that disperse further from the mean.

The issues is that I think I should need a variance standardized/normalized on the mean value of each distribution.

Suggestions?

The next step would be to get a function in R that it is able to do that.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1734

Answers (1)

Morgan Ball
Morgan Ball

Reputation: 790

You don't need to standardise/normalise because variance is calculated as distance from the mean so is already normalised around the sample mean.

To demonstrate this run the following code

x<-runif(10000,min=100,max=101)
y<-runif(10000,min=1,max=2)
mean(x)
mean(y)
var(x)
var(y)

You'll see while the mean is different the variance of the two samples is identical (allowing for some difference due to pseudo-random number generation and sample size)

Upvotes: 2

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