What is the primary effect of applying Standard Scaler to a dataset containing significant outliers?

Question

Data Science — Medium

What is the primary effect of applying Standard Scaler to a dataset containing significant outliers?

Accepted Answer

StandardScaler calculates the mean and standard deviation based on all data points. Because these statistics are sensitive to extreme values, outliers significantly inflate the standard deviation and shift the mean, causing the resulting scaled values to be compressed into a very narrow range for the majority of the data points.