Important: The stats package has been deprecated. Use the superseding package Statistics instead.

The variance command (variance) of the stats[describe, ...] subpackage computes the variance of the given data.

The variance is defined to be the square  of the standard deviation.

Classes are assumed to be represented by the class mark, for example 10..12 has the value 11. Missing data are ignored.

The definition of standard deviation varies according to whether it is computed for the whole population, or only for a sample. The parameter Nconstraint provides for this. For more information on the subject, refer to describe[standarddeviation].

The command with(stats[describe],variance) allows the use of the abbreviated form of this command.