What are Measures in Statistics?

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Statistics is the branch of mathematics that deals with the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data or information.Everyday a huge amount of data is dealt in small scale and large scale industries such as consumer data, population of the country, production and distribution of products, etc. An auxiliary examination of the information from an arranged report utilizes instruments from information investigation, and the way toward doing this is numerical measurements.

Statistical information assortment is worried about the arranging of studies, particularly with the plan of randomized analyses and with the arranging of reviews utilizing arbitrary inspecting.  The statistics meaning is simply the collection and summarizing of data. The underlying examination of the information frequently follows the investigation convention indicated before the examination being led. The information from an examination can likewise be dissected to consider auxiliary speculations enlivened by the underlying outcomes, or to recommend new investigations. 

Basics of Statistics

The basic of statistics includes two important measures:

  • Measure of Central tendency
  • Measure of Dispersion

Measures of Central tendency

Measures of central tendencies are the three important measures, viz, mean, median and mode (MMM). All the three measures are used to find the central value or central position of the given set of data as a single value. Mean is nothing but the average of the given data. Median is the central value when the numerical data is arranged in an order. Mode is the value that is repeated in the data maximum number of times. The examples of Mean, Median and Mode are given below.

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Example of Mean

Find the mean of 12, 34, 45, 50, 24.

Mean = (Sum of all values)/(Number of values)

Mean = (12 + 34 + 45 + 50 + 24)/5 = 165/5 = 33

It is not necessary that the mean is only calculated for raw data but also for the data represented in frequency distribution form.

Example of Median

Median is calculated for grouped and ungrouped data. 

For example, the data is  56, 67, 54, 34, 78, 43, 23. Find the median.

Let us first arrange the data into ascending order.

23, 34, 43, 54, 56, 67, 78. 

Number of observations = 7

Median = 4th observation = 54

For an even number of observations, we have to find the average of two central most values to find the median.

Example of Mode

Mode = Observation with maximum frequency

For example,  6, 8, 9, 3, 4, 6, 7, 6, 3 is the data set. Now we can see, the value that is repeated here the most number of times is 6. Therefore,

Mode = 6

Measure of Dispersion

Dispersion in statistics is the spread of data about an average value. Dispersion represents the distribution of data around the mean value. Standard deviation statistics and variance statistics are the two important measures of dispersion. Variance is the average of squared differences of the mean of a data whereas standard deviation is the square root of variance. All the measures we have learned here are the absolute measures in statistics. Some other measures of dispersion are range, quartiles deviations, etc. All these measures are very important in statistical analysis.

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