Statistics information conceptual, definition, understand, please, question

w1977

Can anyone go into greater detail on statistics terms? Standard deviation and so forth. I understand the definition and how to apply & calculate it but I’m not sure I’d get it right if they asked me a conceptual question. If you know of a book where I can get a better handle on this, please post the name and the author. Thx

Penny-wenny

A. Thanks for the info. I can do the math part, e.g., here are 10 observations, find the Std Dev, variance, CV etc. What I'm worried about is if they ask some question that is not math, but tests a concept it could be std dev or anything else in quant. I hear there is not too much math on the exam, but they want you to know the concepts, and I'm worried I'll be "tripped up" Thanks for your insight.

chetan86

They do test you on concepts a lot, but not in the manner you're thinking. Go through the CFA mock and sample tests ans you'll see what testing on concepts means.

ftwcfa

Conceptually, the standard deviation is the average distance that a data set is away from the mean of that set.

For example if your data set is the following two points: 1 and 5
The average is 3. The standard deviation is 2 because on average, the points in the data set (1 and 5) are two spots away from the average of three.

Hope that helps.