An unknown data set has a standard deviation of 10. What is the standard deviation when each value in the data set is multiplied by 5?

Verified Answer :

Let \(\mathbf x=\{x_i~:~1\le i\le n\}\) be the sample, with \(n\) the size of the sample.

The mean of the sample is

\(\displaystyle\bar x=\frac1n\sum_{i=1}^nx_i\)

Let \(\mathbf y\) be the same data set but with each value scaled up by 5. Then the mean here is

\(\bar y=\displaystyle\frac1n\sum_{i=1}^ny_i=\frac5n\sum_{i=1}^nx_i=5\bar x\)

The standard deviation for \(\mathbf x\) is given by

\(s_{\mathbf x}=\sqrt{\displaystyle\frac1{n-1}\sum_{i=1}^n(\bar x-x_i)^2}\)

For \(\mathbf y\), you would have

\(s_{\mathbf y}=\sqrt{\displaystyle\frac1{n-1}\sum_{i=1}^n(\bar y-y_i)^2}\)
\(s_{\mathbf y}=\sqrt{\displaystyle\frac1{n-1}\sum_{i=1}^n(5\bar x-5x_i)^2}\)
\(s_{\mathbf y}=\sqrt{\displaystyle\frac{25}{n-1}\sum_{i=1}^n(\bar x-x_i)^2}\)
\(s_{\mathbf y}=5\sqrt{\displaystyle\frac1{n-1}\sum_{i=1}^n(\bar x-x_i)^2}\)
\(s_{\mathbf y}=5s_{\mathbf x}\)