# What is "unit" standard deviation?

It is a common practice to normalize data for training a neural network to zero mean and "unit" standard deviation to reduce exploding and vanishing gradient effects etc.

What does "unit" std mean here? An example would be really helpful.

• It means equal to 1. To get that you divide values by the standard deviation of the original data. (The zero mean comes from subtracting the mean.) Sep 30, 2017 at 12:32

It means you are converting your data features from its original units (miles, dollars, elapsed time,...) to units of standard deviation. As you requested follows a very simple example:

Supose you want to predict house prices from two features: number of bedrooms (integer unit) and size (in squared meters unit), like the fictitious data bellow:

import numpy as np

X = np.array([[1, 65],[3, 130],[2, 80],[2, 70],[1, 50]])


Notice that each feature have very different mean and standard deviation

print("mean={}, std{}".format(X.mean(axis=0), X.std(axis=0))


Outputs: mean=[ 1.83333333, 78.33333333]), std=[ 0.68718427, 24.94438258])

Noticed that the feature size has mean and std more than 30x bigger than number of bedroom, this produces distortions in some algorithms calculation (like neural nets, svm, knn, etc) where somes feature with larger values dominates completely the others with smaller values. To solve that an common and very effective practice is to transform the data to units of standard deviation with zero mean, that is, you subtract the mean and divides by the standard deviation, like bellow:

X_t = (X - X.mean(axis=0))/X.std(axis=0)


The variable X_t (X transformed) contains your features in unit standard deviations with zero mean, printing X_t you get:

array([[-1.21267813, -0.53452248],
[ 1.69774938,  2.07127462],
[ 0.24253563,  0.06681531],
[ 0.24253563, -0.33407655],
[-1.21267813, -1.13586028],
[ 0.24253563, -0.13363062]])


Look how the numbers in both features have all the same magnitude. If you print X_t mean and std now you get

mean=[  1.11022302e-16   2.08166817e-16], std=[ 1.  1.]


as expected.