Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos: A comparison of various estimators of the coefficient of variation

The coefficient of variation is a standardised measure of dispersion relative to a data set's average. Known by different names (e.g. relative standard deviation, coefficient of dispersion), this measure has been employed in fields such as engineering, medical physics, biochemistry, neuroscience, and, to a lesser extent, psychology. Although merely a handful of these measures have been proposed, their performance has not been systematically investigated. Here we compare the performance of four estimators across several statistical distributions of varying parameters and sample sizes. Some recommendations are given and future research directions are discussed.