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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.
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. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] To calculate the IQR, the data set is divided into quartiles , or four rank-ordered even parts via linear interpolation. [ 1 ]
The five-number summary gives information about the location (from the median), spread (from the quartiles) and range (from the sample minimum and maximum) of the observations. Since it reports order statistics (rather than, say, the mean) the five-number summary is appropriate for ordinal measurements , as well as interval and ratio measurements.
Example of samples from two populations with the same mean but different standard deviations. Red population has mean 100 and SD 10; blue population has mean 100 and SD 50. A large standard deviation indicates that the data points can spread far from the mean and a small standard deviation indicates that they are clustered closely around the mean.
If the set is a sample from the whole population, then the unbiased sample variance can be calculated as 1017.538 that is the sum of the squared deviations about the mean of the sample, divided by 11 instead of 12. A function VAR.S in Microsoft Excel gives the unbiased sample variance while VAR.P is for population variance.
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. It is calculated by taking the average of the absolute differences between each data point and the chosen central value.
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 .
The value of the normal density is practically zero when the value lies more than a few standard deviations away from the mean (e.g., a spread of three standard deviations covers all but 0.27% of the total distribution).