Question

In your own area of study or interests, when would it be helpful to know measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and measures of variation (range and standard deviation) about a data set? Your response should be thoughtful and include a paragraph description at the minimum. Please title your subject "Central tendency and variation" when doing your post. Example: As a beekeeper, it's interesting to keep records to see how much honey is produced each year. The location of the hives could also make a difference on the production level. Therefore, recording the pounds of honey extracted from each individual hive could be useful. Finding the measures of central tendency would give the beekeeper an idea of how good the season was. Finding the mean, median, and mode could indicate whether the year was comparable to previous years. Finding the measures of variation could indicate how values deviate from the mean. All of these figures in the long run could help a beekeeper decide whether the amount of hives is sufficient for the amount of honey they want to collect and whether they should purchase more hives.

area of study computer science

Answer 1

1.)u measure 9f central tendency is mean because of it's equal weights to each observation and takes each observation under consideration. But the mean is affected alot by outliers and skewed data. So if there are many outliers then this shouldn't be used.

Example - average marks of all the students in a class. Since generally paper set is designed in such a way that 30% easy and 10 very very difficult. So less outliers and mean would be best to calculate average.

2.) Median gives us the middle value and can be used if the data is skewed and has large outliers.

For example median package of IITB students. The data is very skewed because students got package above 50 lacks and students get less package as well since number of students are large. In this skewed data, median is best average

3.) Mode can be used for qualitative data ( after decoding) that is categorical data because it gives the most frequent observation.

For example if we want to know the average shoe size of male, then mode is the best average because we want maximum people who are using common shoe size.

4.) Standard deviation is the best measure to measure variation since it takes into account all the observations. It can be used everywhere unless few observations are missing.

For example standard deviation to measure in average marks. ( We use to give zero mark to student who is absent )

5.) Range takes only two values to measure variation that is maximum and minimum. Therefore it can be used everywhere but won't be good measure but it can be used if observation are missing.