What’s the difference between sx and σx in the statistics calculations on a TI-Nspire?

After cross-checking in Excel and reading Bessel’s correction and Unbiased estimation of standard deviation on Wikipedia …

σx gives the “regular” standard deviation and sx applies Bessel’s correction. In other words, σx is the exact standard deviation of the data given (with n in the denominator), and sx is an unbiased estimation of the standard deviation of a larger population assuming that the data given is only a sample of that population (i.e. with n-1 in the denominator).

Leave a Comment