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Robust measures of scale can be used as estimators of properties of the population, either for parameter estimation or as estimators of their own expected value.. For example, robust estimators of scale are used to estimate the population standard deviation, generally by multiplying by a scale factor to make it an unbiased consistent estimator; see scale parameter: estimation.
Box-and-whisker plot with four mild outliers and one extreme outlier. In this chart, outliers are defined as mild above Q3 + 1.5 IQR and extreme above Q3 + 3 IQR. The interquartile range is often used to find outliers in data. Outliers here are defined as observations that fall below Q1 − 1.5 IQR or above Q3 + 1.5 IQR.
Thus, if the mean is intended as a measure of the location of the center of the data, it is, in a sense, biased when outliers are present. Also, the distribution of the mean is known to be asymptotically normal due to the central limit theorem. However, outliers can make the distribution of the mean non-normal, even for fairly large data sets.
The median absolute deviation is a measure of statistical dispersion. Moreover, the MAD is a robust statistic, being more resilient to outliers in a data set than the standard deviation. In the standard deviation, the distances from the mean are squared, so large deviations are weighted more heavily, and thus outliers can heavily influence it ...
These quartiles are used to calculate the interquartile range, which helps to describe the spread of the data, and determine whether or not any data points are outliers. In order for these statistics to exist, the observations must be from a univariate variable that can be measured on an ordinal, interval or ratio scale .
The sample maximum and minimum are the least robust statistics: they are maximally sensitive to outliers.. This can either be an advantage or a drawback: if extreme values are real (not measurement errors), and of real consequence, as in applications of extreme value theory such as building dikes or financial loss, then outliers (as reflected in sample extrema) are important.
This is because raising a number less than 1 to the fourth power brings it closer to zero. The meaningful contributors to kurtosis are data values outside the peak region, i.e., the outliers. Therefore, kurtosis primarily measures outliers and provides no information about the central "peak".
Sometimes, a set of numbers might contain outliers (i.e., data values which are much lower or much higher than the others). Often, outliers are erroneous data caused by artifacts. In this case, one can use a truncated mean. It involves discarding given parts of the data at the top or the bottom end, typically an equal amount at each end and ...