The measure that indicates the extent of variability in a dataset is known as?

The measure that indicates the extent of variability in a dataset is the variance. Variance quantifies how far the numbers in a dataset are spread out from the average (mean). It is calculated by taking the average of the squared differences between each data point and the mean of the dataset. This means that variance provides a clear numerical value representing how much the values differ from one another, highlighting the dispersion within the data. A higher variance indicates greater variability, while a lower variance indicates that the data points are closer to the mean.

The mean, while a crucial measure, represents central tendency rather than variability. Correlation measures the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two variables, and covariance indicates the degree to which two variables change together. Neither correlation nor covariance solely focuses on the spread of a single dataset, making variance the appropriate measure for assessing variability.