From the course: Statistics Foundations 1: The Basics

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Introduction to variability

Introduction to variability - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Statistics Foundations 1: The Basics

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Introduction to variability

- Mean, median, and mode, all helpful in understanding a data set. They're all simple concepts and all easy to calculate, but they have their limitations. For example, take these two dots or data points. Where is their midpoint? It's here. How about these two data points? Same middle. Both sets of dots have the same midpoint, but clearly the two sets of dots are very different. When we use real numbers, we find the same thing. All three of these tiny data sets have the same mean. The mean is 30, but each data set is obviously different. In data set one, the two data points are very close, but by the time we get to data set three, the two data points are very far apart. So how do we describe how close or how far away data points are from each other in a data set? In this chapter, we'll discuss range and standard deviation, two measures that help us understand how spread out the data points are in our data sets, which is…

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