# What happens when you try to find standard deviation of a (non-truncated) cauchy distribution? [duplicate]

I have read that this doesn't work, but I do not understand exactly why. Please can someone explain.

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… Oct 12 '21 at 20:24
• My pen began smoking... The paper caught fire... I had to put it out. Computing with divergent integrals can be hazardous!
– whuber
Oct 12 '21 at 20:33
• We have many explanations. They can be found with a site search. One of the more useful threads is stats.stackexchange.com/questions/91512.
– whuber
Oct 12 '21 at 20:45
• @whuber This discussion on whether variance must be defined with reference to the mean is interesting, though it seems fair to say that definition of variance in terms of the mean is much more commonly seen, even if it has some disadvantages compared to eg looking at squares of differences between pairs of data-points. Oct 13 '21 at 14:03
• I should certainly post a corrigendum to my earlier statement that the Cauchy distribution's variance is undefined "as it has to be since the mean is undefined" - this is obviously true if we define the variance in terms of the mean, but this is not the only way that variance can be defined, as @whuber points out Oct 13 '21 at 14:26

I thought I would take a stab at it.

The standard formula for the standard deviation assumes that a standard deviation exists. One way to look at it would be to imagine that you created a pattern recognition program that recognizes noses. Imagine that if you feed in an image, then it will output the location of the nose.

Vertebrates have noses. Nothing else has a nose.

If you run the nose finding algorithm on a tree, it will still output the location of the tree’s nose. As you can imagine, that will be a meaningless thing to do.

So what I did was create 100,000 samples of thirty observations each from the standard Cauchy distribution in R. I used it to compare the estimates of the interquartile range and the algorithmic estimate of the standard deviation that appears in most textbooks.

First, I estimated the interquartile range (IQR) and the standard deviation (SD) for each sample using the R functions IQR and sd. The distribution of one estimate versus the other is here.

Second, I restricted the estimate of the SD to 750, which is about 99.5% of the cases. Its graph is here.

Fifty percent of the data for the entire set falls between $$\pm{1}$$. Tukey’s five point summary for the data is

Minimum -417,190

1 Quartile -1

Median 0

3 Quartile 1

Maximum 4,285,676

The average estimated value of the SD is 52.28. Remember that half the data falls between -1 and 1.

Tukey’s five-point summary for the SD is

Minimum 0.75

1 Quartile 3.76

Median 6.47

3 Quartile 13.76

Maximum 782,453

On the other hand, the IQR is reasonably well behaved, as can be seen by the sampling distribution of the IQR. I could not produce a visual for the sampling distribution of the SD because it is too irregularly shaped.

The worst sample of the 100,000 samples, in terms of estimating the IQR was sample 42447. It's plot is

As you can see, the SD is all over the place because it doesn't exist. Formally speaking, it is undefined. So is the nose on a tree.

The code to create it was

rm(list=ls())
library(ggplot2)
library(ggthemes)
set.seed(500)

observations<-30
experiments<-100000

x<-matrix(rcauchy(observations*experiments),nrow = observations)

scale_estimates<-data.frame(standard_deviation=apply(x,2,sd), Interquartile_range=apply(x,2,IQR))

a<-ggplot(data = scale_estimates,aes(Interquartile_range,standard_deviation))+theme_wsj()
a<-a+geom_point()+ggtitle("IQR Versus Standard Deviation")

print(a)

a<-ggplot(data = scale_estimates,aes(Interquartile_range,standard_deviation))+theme_wsj()
a<-a+geom_point()+coord_cartesian(ylim = c(0,750))

print(a)

print(fivenum(scale_estimates$standard_deviation)) print(mean(scale_estimates$standard_deviation))

print(fivenum(as.vector(x)))

print(mean(x))

a<-ggplot(data = scale_estimates,aes(Interquartile_range))+theme_wsj()
a<-a+geom_density()+ggtitle("IQR Sampling Density")
print(a)

print(fivenum(scale_estimates$$Interquartile_range)) print(mean(scale_estimates$$Interquartile_range))

print(scale_estimates[scale_estimates$Interquartile_range>8.5,]) worst_estimator_data<-data.frame(x=x[,42447]) a<-ggplot(data = worst_estimator_data,aes(x))+theme_wsj() a<-a+geom_density()+ggtitle("KDE of Worst Sample") print(a)  I do apologize, I didn't annotate the R code. I got sleepy. You will need to change the worst plot if you change the seed or comment it out. One thing I did not do was increase the sample size. If I had, the measurement of the SD would have gotten larger and crazier, while the sampling distribution of the IQR would have narrowed. The estimates of the SD of the Cauchy distribution get worse as the sample size gets larger and larger. I think this example emphasizes one very useful thing. The formulas that appear in textbooks are not the true values. They are estimators. In this case, a true mean, variance or standard deviation do not exist, but the formula doesn't vanish. It just doesn't do anything useful. • In this case the SD does exist, but is infinite. Please also see related comments at stats.stackexchange.com/questions/548039/… and stats.stackexchange.com/questions/548039/…. – whuber Oct 13 '21 at 13:50 • @whuber but infinity is not in the set of real numbers. It might go to infinity, but doesn't that, in part depend on how the integral is defined. I defer to you as this is your bailiwick as I may be misunderstanding the idea of a limit and a definition. That might be an interesting question for stack exchange if I could think about how to generalize it. It is being picky but it might matter. Does the wording of the definitions matter and does it produce differing intuition? Is there a lesson there? Some probability paradoxes, seem to be partly limit based. Oct 15 '21 at 3:16 • @whuber I will think about how to edit the post to conform to your comment. Oct 15 '21 at 3:17 Comment. One clue is that you get erratic results when you try Monte Carlo approximation. Student's t distribution with one degree of freedom is standard Cauchy. In the R code below I try to approximate the (nonexistent) standard deviation of this distribution by finding the sample SD of a sample of a million. In six tries I get six very different answers. The very fat tails of the Cauchy distribution (which prevent existence of the population standard deviation) give far outliers at random that make the sample standard deviations very different from one run to another. set.seed(1234) sd(rt(10^6,1)) [1] 4369.947 sd(rt(10^6,1)) [1] 546.1966 sd(rt(10^6,1)) [1] 1111.853 sd(rt(10^6,1)) [1] 1040.681 sd(rt(10^6,1)) [1] 975.8808 sd(rt(10^6,1)) [1] 597.3756  By contrast, if I do the same thing for a normal distribution with $$\sigma = 50,$$ I get consistent answers to about two or three significant digits. set.seed(1235) sd(rnorm(10^6,0,50)) [1] 50.00368 sd(rnorm(10^6,0,50)) [1] 50.05707 sd(rnorm(10^6,0,50)) [1] 50.0941 sd(rnorm(10^6,0,50)) [1] 50.01311 sd(rnorm(10^6,0,50)) [1] 49.98236 sd(rnorm(10^6,0,50)) [1] 49.99185  The method also works for samples of a million from an exponential population with rate $$1/50,$$ mean $$50,$$ and standard deviation $$50.$$ (Agreement to about two significant digits.) set.seed(1236) sd(rexp(10^6,1/50)) [1] 50.01171 sd(rexp(10^6,1/50)) [1] 50.07582 sd(rexp(10^6,1/50)) [1] 50.05828 sd(rexp(10^6,1/50)) [1] 50.04774 sd(rexp(10^6,1/50)) [1] 50.08311 sd(rexp(10^6,1/50)) [1] 50.04089  Finally, Student's t distribution with 3 degrees of freedom does have a standard deviation $$(\sigma = \sqrt{3}\approx 1.732).$$ (Results close to 1.7.) set.seed(1237) sd(rt(10^6,3)) [1] 1.71784 sd(rt(10^6,3)) [1] 1.733405 sd(rt(10^6,3)) [1] 1.730881 sd(rt(10^6,3)) [1] 1.717023 sd(rt(10^6,3)) [1] 1.739444 sd(rt(10^6,3)) [1] 1.736086  • The erratic results indeed can serve to illustrate one of the implications of having a huge variance. However, a Monte-Carlo explanation is ultimately unsatisfying because (among other things) it doesn't really distinguish distributions with finite variances from those with infinite variances. You will get equally erratic results when simulating, say, from a Student$t(2.01)\$ distribution, which does have a finite variance.
– whuber
Oct 13 '21 at 13:48