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In statistics, dispersion (also called variability, scatter, or spread) is the extent to which a distribution is stretched or squeezed. [1] Common examples of measures of statistical dispersion are the variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. For instance, when the variance of data in a set is large, the data is widely scattered.
In descriptive statistics, the interquartile range (IQR) is a measure of statistical dispersion, which is the spread of the data. [1] The IQR may also be called the midspread, middle 50%, fourth spread, or H‑spread. It is defined as the difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles of the data.
For a set of numbers {10, 15, 30, 45, 57, 52 63, 72, 81, 93, 102, 105}, if this set is the whole data population for some measurement, then variance is the population variance 932.743 as the sum of the squared deviations about the mean of this set, divided by 12 as the number of the set members.
The mean and the standard deviation of a set of data are descriptive statistics usually reported together. In a certain sense, the standard deviation is a "natural" measure of statistical dispersion if the center of the data is measured about the mean. This is because the standard deviation from the mean is smaller than from any other point.
x i is the data element, m(X) is the chosen measure of central tendency of the data set—sometimes the mean (¯), but most often the median. The average absolute deviation (AAD) in statistics is a measure of the dispersion or spread of a set of data points around a central value, usually the mean or median.
If there are an odd number of data points in the original ordered data set, include the median (the central value in the ordered list) in both halves. If there are an even number of data points in the original ordered data set, split this data set exactly in half. The lower quartile value is the median of the lower half of the data.
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.
Measures that assess spread in comparison to the typical size of data values include the coefficient of variation. The Gini coefficient was originally developed to measure income inequality and is equivalent to one of the L-moments .