Definition
Plain language
A way to measure how spread out a set of numbers is relative to their average, so you can compare variability across things of different scales.
As stated in the literature
The ratio of standard deviation to mean, a scale-invariant measure of dispersion; used in this corpus to report the noisiness of threshold-size estimates.
Why it matters: It lets you fairly compare how noisy or consistent two measurements are even when they're on completely different scales.
For example, a delivery time averaging 30 minutes with a 3-minute spread is far more consistent than one averaging 5 minutes with a 3-minute spread, and this measure captures that difference.
Heard on the show
“The estimates they report have coefficient of variation up to twenty-five percent.”Episode 036 — Sparse Attention Was the Wrong Frame. Treat It as Geometry Instead.