Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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.
An advantage of variance as a measure of dispersion is that it is more amenable to algebraic manipulation than other measures of dispersion such as the expected absolute deviation; for example, the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables is equal to the sum of their variances. A disadvantage of the variance for practical applications ...
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 ...
Several measures of statistical dispersion are defined in terms of the absolute deviation. The term "average absolute deviation" does not uniquely identify a measure of statistical dispersion, as there are several measures that can be used to measure absolute deviations, and there are several measures of central tendency that can be used as well.
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. For example, each of the three populations {0, 0, 14, 14}, {0, 6, 8, 14} and {6, 6, 8, 8} has a mean of 7. Their standard deviations are 7, 5, and 1, respectively.
Common measures of statistical dispersion are the standard deviation, variance, range, interquartile range, absolute deviation, mean absolute difference and the distance standard deviation. Measures that assess spread in comparison to the typical size of data values include the coefficient of variation .
In mathematics and statistics, deviation serves as a measure to quantify the disparity between an observed value of a variable and another designated value, frequently the mean of that variable. Deviations with respect to the sample mean and the population mean (or " true value ") are called errors and residuals , respectively.