Rational Developer for System z
Enterprise COBOL for z/OS, Version 4.1, Language Reference


VARIANCE

The VARIANCE function returns a numeric value that approximates the variance of its arguments.

The function type is numeric.

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Format

                         .------------.      
                         V            |      
>>-FUNCTION VARIANCE--(----argument-1-+--)---------------------><

argument-1
Must be class numeric.

The returned value is the approximation of the variance of the argument-1 series.

The returned value is defined as the square of the standard deviation of the argument-1 series. This value is calculated as follows:

  1. The difference between each argument-1 value and the arithmetic mean of the argument-1 series is calculated and squared.
  2. The values obtained are then added together. This quantity is divided by the number of values in the argument series.

If the argument-1 series consists of only one value, or if the argument-1 series consists of all variable-occurrence data items and the total number of occurrences for all of them is one, the returned value is zero.


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