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I have 2 point clouds (3D points). I can visually tell that the spread in one cloud is much larger than the other, and I have also plotted their error ellipsoids. Now, I'm looking for a statistical test which proves that the the spread is larger in one cloud.

So my question is, if I use a statistical test like Levene/Brown-Forsyth/Box-M to test if the variances of two populations are not equal, does it mean that I have statistically shown that the variance (or the spread) or the clouds are different?

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Are you asking whether these two clouds have different spreads (which is literally what the question says) or are these clouds samples of two populations and you want to know whether the population variances are different? Also, could you explain what an "error ellipsoid" might be and how that would be related to the "spreads" or variances? – whuber♦ Aug 14 '11 at 22:57

migrated from math.stackexchange.com Aug 12 '11 at 22:12

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