SDS 306 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Interquartile Range, Quartile, Multimodal Distribution

• School: UT-Austin
• Department: Statistics and Data Sciences
• Course: SDS 306
• Professor: Manheimer Jerry

Document Summary

For symmetric distributions, the mean and the median are equal. For asymmetric distributions: the tail pulls the mean towards it more than it does to the median. The mean is more sensitive to outliers than the median. Although the median is a better measure of the center, the mean weighs in large and small values better. The mean is easier to work with. For symmetric data, statisticians would rather use the mean. It is always ok to report both the mean and the median. Locating the center is only part of the story. To describe data, we must discuss both the center and the spread. The range is the difference between the maximum and minimum values. The ages of the guests at your dinner party are: The range is: 74 16 = 58. A single high or low value will affect the range significantly. Percentiles divide the data in one hundred groups.