[R] Variance is different in R vs. Excel?

[David L Carlson]

Time for a new version of Excel? I cannot duplicate your results in Excel 2013.

R:
> apply(dat, 2, var)
[1] 21290.80 24748.75

Excel 2013:
=VAR.S(A2:A21)   =VAR.S(B2:B21)
21290.8          24748.74737

-------------------------------------
David L Carlson
Department of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77840-4352


-----Original Message-----
From: R-help [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Karl Fetter
Sent: Monday, February 9, 2015 3:33 PM
To: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: [R] Variance is different in R vs. Excel?

Hello everyone, I have a simple question. when I use the var() function in
R to find a variance, it differs greatly from the variance found in excel
using the =VAR.S function. Any explanations on what those two functions are
actually doing?

Here is the data and the results:

dat<-matrix(c(402,908,553,522,627,1040,756,679,806,711,713,734,683,790,597,872,476,1026,423,476,419,591,376,640,550,601,588,499,646,693,351,730,632,707,779,838,814,771,533,818),
nrow=20, ncol=2, byrow=T)

var(dat[,1])
#21290.8

var(dat[,2])
#24748.75

#in Excel, the variance of dat[,1] = 44763.91; for dat[,2] = 52034.2

Thanks,

Karl

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