What is "homoscedasticity"

alt. (context statistics English) A property of a set of random variables such that each variable has the same finite variance. n. (context statistics English) A property of a set of random variables such that each variable has the same finite variance.

In statistics, a sequence or a vector of random variables is homoscedastic if all random variables in the sequence or vector have the same finite variance. This is also known as homogeneity of variance. The complementary notion is called heteroscedasticity. The spellings homoskedasticity and heteroskedasticity are also frequently used.

The assumption of homoscedasticity simplifies mathematical and computational treatment. Serious violations in homoscedasticity (assuming a distribution of data is homoscedastic when in reality it is heteroscedastic ) may result in overestimating the goodness of fit as measured by the Pearson coefficient.