Re: var(1) = 0 ??

[Freddy López]

Hello.

Indeed, this is an interesting observation. I have checked this in several softwares. 

Scilab and R reported an error or NA message with var(c) and FreeMat reported ans = 0. Python (scipy) also reported 0 as answer.

Cheers.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 19:35, Muhali <address@hidden> wrote:

> why would you expect a different result?

this is where it is getting philosophical, or Bayesian, if you want. If you
pick one number out of an unknown population, we just don't know whether
there is variance in the population or not. There is no best estimate for
the variance; 0 is just as good as any other. So I would very much prefer a
result of NaN, but it is mostly convention as I said.

At least the help text, which has (n-1) in the denominator, should be
adjusted accordingly.

M.


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