Applying this to the original formula for standard deviation gives: 
In the real world, finding the standard deviation of an entire population is unrealistic except in certain cases,such as... where every member of a population is sampled. In most cases, the standard deviation is estimated by examining a random sample taken from the population. Using the definition given above for a data set and applying it to a small or moderately-sized sample results in an estimate that tends to be too low. The most common measure used is an adjusted version, the sample standard deviation, which is defined by 
where is the sample and is the mean of the sample. The denominator N − 1 is the number of degrees of freedom in the vector . |