# What is the name of this normalization?

This may be a stupid question but... is there a specific name for normalizing some data so that it has mean=0 and sd=1?

Or do I just say "data was normalized to have mean=0 and sd=1"?

thanks nico

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maybe standardized ? – gd047 Aug 20 '10 at 8:34
Just a comment on the tag. Right now we have one question tagged "nomenclature" and another question tagged "terminology". I personally prefer "terminology" - it's much more common in everyday language than nomenclature, but I see nomenclature potentially being used. Could someone consider a tag synonym or just a rename one way or the other? – Thomas Owens Aug 20 '10 at 10:18
@Thomas Owens: you are right, terminology is better, I changed it. I guess "nomenclature" sounds better to people in biology :) – nico Aug 20 '10 at 11:05
btw, this is special case of "whitening" which takes data and makes it's empirical covariance matrix identity – Yaroslav Bulatov Aug 24 '10 at 19:30

The quantity $z = \frac{X - \mu}{\sigma}$ is a standard score. So, standardization is a common way to refer to it.