Calculating Jitter

Fri Jun 10 17:07:06 UTC 2005

At 09:56 AM 6/10/2005, Fred Baker wrote:

>you saw marshall's comment. If you're interested in a moving average, he's 
>pretty close.
>
>If I understood your question, though, you simply wanted to quantify the 
>jitter in a set of samples. I should think there are two obvious 
>definitions there.
>
>A statistician would look, I should think, at the variance of the set. 
>Reaching for my CRC book of standard math formulae and tables, it defines 
>the variance as the square of the standard deviation of the set, which is 
>to say

That is one thing I have never understood, if you can pretty much just look 
at a standard dev and see it is high, and yeah that means your numbers are 
flopping all over the place, then what good is the square of it? Does it 
just make graphing better in some way?

Thanks,

Eric 