Variations on a snowman

The Green Cow

Some time ago I explained P-values, the central concept of statistics. In this explanation I talked about standard deviation. Now I will try and explain what standard deviations are. You probably all heard about means. For instance, if you measure the length of fty persons, the mean is calculated by adding all the lengths and dividing the result by fty. The meaning of the resulting number is that if you choose someone of the population, prior to measuring you expect him to have the mean length. O course, not everyone is going to have exactly this length. The standard deviation is a measure of how much the persons are deviating from the mean. Technically, the standard deviation is nothing more or less than the square root of the variance.1 Which is probably not really helpful in explaining what it is. Therefore, I will try to give a more intuitive explanation of the concepts of standard deviation and variance. First, take a look at the pictures in gure 1. All pictures are representing snowmen. You will immediately recognize them as such, although they dier in several aspects. They are all variations on a theoretical concept of a snowman, an idea you have about what a snowman should look like. You could see this idea as the mean snowman; it is what you expect to see when someone shows you a snowman. All actual snowmen are variations on this idea. In statistical terms that is the variance. The variance of snowmen could be quantied by making a score capturing the snowmanship of each individual snowmen. Such a score could look like the one in table 1. The score I set up was based on the article about snowmen in Wikipedia. We can calculate the scores for the snowmen in gure 1. Misters One, Two and Three all have a score of -2, while Mister Four has a score of -7. We can calculate the mean as -3.25, the standard deviation as 2.5 and the variance as 6.25. 2 These numbers can be interpreted as follows: if you calculate the snowmanship score for a fth snowman, you expect this score to be -3.25 and you expect that 68% of all snowman will have a snowmanship score between -5.75 and -0.75. 3 An object will statistically signicant 4 not be a snowman
1 2

How the variance is calculated, depends on the underlying distribution. Assuming a normal distribution. 3 Again assuming a normal distribution. 4 On the 5% level

(a) Mister Snow One (Source)

(b) Mister Snow Second (Source)

(c) Mister Snow Three (Source)

(d) Mister Snow Four (Source)

Figure 1: Snowmen demonstrating the variance on the concept of a snowman.

Feature Made of snow Anthropomorphic Snow balls

Face Nose

Limbs

Clothing

Value Yes No Yes No 1 2 3 4 >4 Recognizable None Carrot Other object None None Branches Snow None Hat Hat and scarf Hat and scarf and more

Score 0 -100 0 -10 -2 -1 0 +1 +2 0 -2 0 -1 -2 -2 0 +5 -1 0 +1 +2

Table 1: Score quantifying snowmanship. if it has a score below -8.15 (=-3.25-2.5*1.965 of the normal distribution) or above 1.65 (=-3.25+2.5*1.96). If somebody would like to test the accuracy of the snowmanship score you can contact me.

Z-value for 2.5% and 97.5%