[Numpy-discussion] non-standard standard deviation

[Dr. Phillip M. Feldman]

All of the statistical packages that I am currently using and have used in
the past (Matlab, Minitab, R, S-plus) calculate standard deviation using the
sqrt(1/(n-1)) normalization, which gives a result that is unbiased when
sampling from a normally-distributed population.  NumPy uses the sqrt(1/n)
normalization.  I'm currently using the following code to calculate standard
deviations, but would much prefer if this could be fixed in NumPy itself:

def mystd(x=numpy.array([]), axis=None):
   """This function calculates the standard deviation of the input using the
   definition of standard deviation that gives an unbiased result for
samples
   from a normally-distributed population."""
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