Standardization

Standardization is used to bring numerical variables into a shared statistical reference frame. After the transformation, features are centered around the same mean and scaled to the same level of variability. It is especially useful for linear models, PCA, SVMs, and gradient-based optimization. Although it is often confused with normalization, the two serve different purposes: one maps values into a range, while the other statistically re-centers the distribution. It is frequently used to stabilize model behavior.