R: Find the Standard deviation for a vector, matrix, or...

SD {psych} | R Documentation

## Find the Standard deviation for a vector, matrix, or data.frame - do not return error if there are no cases

### Description

Find the standard deviation of a vector, matrix, or data.frame. In the latter two cases, return the sd of each column. Unlike the sd function, return NA if there are no observations rather than throw an error.

### Usage

    SD(x, na.rm = TRUE)   #deprecated

### Arguments

`x` | a vector, data.frame, or matrix
`na.rm` | na.rm is assumed to be TRUE

### Details

Finds the standard deviation of a vector, matrix, or data.frame. Returns NA if no cases.

Just an adaptation of the stats:sd function to return the functionality found in R < 2.7.0 or R >= 2.8.0 Because this problem seems to have been fixed, SD will be removed eventually.

### Value

The standard deviation

### Note

Until R 2.7.0, sd would return a NA rather than an error if no cases were observed. SD brings back that functionality. Although unusual, this condition will arise when analyzing data with high rates of missing values. This function will probably be removed as 2.7.0 becomes outdated.

### Author(s)

William Revelle

### See Also

These functions use SD rather than sd: `describe.by`, `skew`, `kurtosi`

### Examples

    data(attitude)
    apply(attitude,2,sd) #all complete
    attitude[,1] <- NA
    SD(attitude) #missing a column
    describe(attitude)

[Package psych version 1.7.3.21 Index]