Every so often, while reviewing our code as part of a bigger project, we’ll see something that jumps out to us and says, “Hey, with a few tweaks, you could open up a bunch of new possibilities for Coda Makers.” That’s more or less how we uncovered the capabilities to release our new StandardDeviation() and StandardDeviationPopulation() formulas for you today!
While we recognize everyone who uses Coda wasn’t clamoring for statistics functions in their docs, we wanted to release this update once we made some quick changes to enable it for those Makers who have been interested in using Standard Deviations in their docs.
A quick note on the difference between the two formulas:
- StandardDeviation() assumes you are working with a sample from a larger population, and want to use the sample to estimate the standard deviation of the population. It divides by n - 1 in its calculation.
- StandardDeviationPopulation() assumes you are working with the exhaustive population, and so divides by n in its calculation.
For a longer note on the difference between the two formulas, we’d have to invite you to some rigorous discussion on one of our internal Slack threads! If you’d like to learn more about the difference in functions without the color commentary from our CEO and data scientists, our friends at Stack Overflow have a nice write-up that is probably a quicker, smoother read.
Curious how the formulas look in action? Here they are used side-by-side on the same data set:
If you’d like to learn more about Coda Formulas, check out coda.io/formulas, join us for “Formula Fitness” webinars on our CrowdCast, or review past episodes on our YouTube Channel.
And stay tuned to this space ー we’ve got some big updates coming your way soon!
