I have several weighted values for which I am taking a weighted average. I want to calculate a weighted standard deviation using the weighted values and weighted average. How would I modify the typical standard deviation to include weights on each measurement?
This is the standard deviation formula I am using.
When I simply use each weighted value for 'x' and the weighted average for '\bar{x}', the result seems smaller than it should be.
I just found this wikipedia page discussing data of equal significance vs weighted data. The correct way to calculate the biased weighted estimator of variance is
,
though the following, on-the-fly implementation, is more efficient computationally as it does not require calculating the weighted average before looping over the sum on the weighted differences squared
.
Despite my skepticism, I tried both and got the exact same results.
Note, be sure to use the weighted average
.