A pooled standard deviation is simply a weighted average of standard deviations from two or more independent groups.
In statistics it appears most often in the two sample t-test, which is used to test whether or not the means of two populations are equal.
The formula to calculate a pooled standard deviation for two groups is as follows:
Pooled standard deviation = √ (n1-1)s12 + (n2-1)s22 / (n1+n2-2)
where:
- n1, n2: Sample size for group 1 and group 2, respectively.
- s1, s2: Standard deviation for group 1 and group 2, respectively.
The following examples show two methods for calculating a pooled standard deviation between two groups in R.
Method 1: Calculate Pooled Standard Deviation Manually
Suppose we have the following data values for two samples:
- Sample 1: 6, 6, 7, 8, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 15, 16, 17, 19, 19, 21
- Sample 2: 10, 11, 13, 13, 15, 17, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 27, 29, 29
The following code shows how to calculate the pooled standard deviation between these two samples:
#define two samples data1 #find sample standard deviation of each sample s1 sd(data1) s2 sd(data2) #find sample size of each sample n1 length(data1) n2 length(data2) #calculate pooled standard deviation pooled sqrt(((n1-1)*s1^2 + (n2-1)*s2^2) / (n1+n1-2)) #view pooled standard deviation pooled [1] 5.789564
The pooled standard deviation turns out to be 5.789564.
Method 2: Calculate Pooled Standard Deviation Using a Package
Another way to calculate the pooled standard deviation between two samples in R is to use the sd_pooled() function from the effectsize package.
The following code shows how to use this function in practice:
library(effectsize)
#define two samples
data1 #calculate pooled standard deviation between two samples
sd_pooled(data1, data2)
[1] 5.789564
The pooled standard deviation turns out to be 5.789564.
Note that this matches the value that we calculated manually in the previous example.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials provide more information on calculating a pooled standard deviation:
An Introduction to Pooled Standard Deviation
Pooled Standard Deviation Calculator