AcademoCoefficient of Variation Calculator
An interactive tool to calculate the coefficient of variation of a set of numbers.
Mean, \( \mu \)
Standard deviation, \( \sigma \)
Coefficient of variation, \( CV \)
The coefficient of variation, denoted by the two letters, \( CV \), is the ratio of the standard deviation \( \sigma \) to the mean, \( \mu \).
The coefficient of variation is a dimensionless number (i.e. it has no units) and indicates how spread out numbers are in a set of data, relative to the mean. It is particularly useful compared to the standard deviation when comparing the spread of sets which may have different units or different means.
It is calculated using the following equation:
\[ CV = \frac{\sigma}{\mu} \]Step 1
Firstly, the standard deviation, \( \sigma \), is calculated. You can read more about how standard deviation is calculated on our standard deviation calculator page.
Step 2
Next, you need to calculate the mean, \( \mu \). This is done by adding up all of the numbers and then dividing by the number of numbers, \( N \).
Step 3
Finally, you divide the standard deviation by the mean.