STAT 100 Chapter 11: Chapter 11 STATS.docx

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Statistics
• Course: STAT 100
• Professor: Derek Bingham

Document Summary

Categorical variables just record group membership (marital status of a man or the race of a college student) Can display a pie chart or bar graph because few values. Quantitative variables take so many values so have to group together. Histogram is the most common graph of the distribution of a quantitative variable. Classes for a histogram have equal widths. Have to find the right number so its not too few or too many (statistics software will help!) Look for an overall pattern and also for striking deviations from that pattern. An outlier in any graph of data is an individual observation that falls outside the overall pattern of the graph. To see the overall pattern of a histogram, ignore any outliers. To describe the overall pattern of a distribution: give the center and the spread, see if the distribution has a simple shape that you can describe in a few words. Shape : the distribution has a single peak.