The VAR function computes a sample variance of data. The arguments are as follows:

x

specifies an numerical matrix. The VAR function computes the variance of the columns of this matrix.

The VAR function computes the sample variance of a column vector x as where is the number of nonmissing values of x and any missing values have been excluded. When x is a matrix, the sample variance is computed for each column, as the following example shows:

x = {5 1 10,
     6 2 3,
     6 8 5,
     6 7 9,
     7 2 13};
var = var(x);
print var;

The following statemen computes the standard deviation of each column:

sd = sqrt(var(x));

The VAR function returns a missing value for columns with fewer than two nonmissing observations.