PHTY305 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Fahrenheit, Frequency Distribution, Null Hypothesis
Document Summary
Describe what is meant by continuous and categorical data: categorical: can only assume distinct values. Can be measured to a finer degree. In the celsius scale, 0 has been arbitrarily defined as the point at which water freezes. Describe the difference between descriptive and inferential statistics: descriptive studies, describes characteristics of data through numerical summaries, tables & graphs, used to, display distribution of data eg. frequency distribution, histogram, boxplot. Frequency distribution tallies the number of times a score is represented. Boxplot: describe central tendency ie mean, median and mode. Mean is versatile but extreme values can distort it. Median is the middle score, useful when distribution contains a few extreme measues, often used for ordinal measurements, but does not include information from all scores in the distribution. Mode is the score that occurs most frequently, used to describe nominal data. Describe what is meant by normally and non normally distributed data.
