Question

Write a function called st_dev. St_dev should have one #parameter, a filename. The file will contain one integer on #each line. The function should return the population standard #deviation of those numbers.

Answer 1

The function st_dev should calculate the population standard deviation of a set of numbers provided in a file.

Step-by-step explanation:

The function st_dev should calculate the population standard deviation of a set of numbers provided in a file. To do this, you can follow these steps:

1. Read the numbers from the file into a list.
2. Calculate the mean of the numbers by summing them up and dividing by the total count.
3. Calculate the sum of the squared differences of each number and the mean.
4. Divide the sum by the total count to get the variance.
5. Take the square root of the variance to get the standard deviation.
6. Return the standard deviation as the result.

Here's an example implementation in Python:

import math

def st_dev(filename):
with open(filename, 'r') as file:
numbers = [int(line) for line in file]
mean = sum(numbers) / len(numbers)
variance = sum((x - mean) ** 2 for x in numbers) / len(numbers)
std_dev = math.sqrt(variance)
return std_dev

Answer 2

The function called 'st_dev' should calculate the population standard deviation of a set of integers read from a file, with each integer being on a separate line. This involves computing the mean, calculating squared differences, averaging those, and taking the square root to get the standard deviation.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student is asking for the creation of a function named st_dev that calculates the population standard deviation of a set of integers read from a file, with each integer being on a separate line. The standard deviation is a measure of how spread out numbers are in a data set. To calculate it, you would first determine the mean (average) of all the data points. Then, for each number, you'd subtract the mean and square the result (the squared difference). After, you'd average those squared differences. Finally, you'd take the square root of that average, which gives you the population standard deviation.

Here's a sample Python function that would perform this task:

import math

def st_dev(filename):
with open(filename, 'r') as file:
numbers = [int(line.strip()) for line in file]
mean = sum(numbers) / len(numbers)
variance = sum((x - mean) ** 2 for x in numbers) / len(numbers)
return math.sqrt(variance)

This function first reads all the numbers from the file, computes the mean, calculates the variance by averaging the squared differences from the mean, and finally returns the square root of the variance, which is the population standard deviation.