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Tag: central tendency

How do I decide which measure of central tendency to use?

How do I decide which measure of central tendency to use?

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A common struggle for novice statisticians is choosing a measure of central tendency that is most appropriate in a given situation. It depends on the type of data you have and some basic data distribution characteristics. If your data values are categories or descriptive words (e.g., political party, eye color, the country where you were born), the mode is your best option. Categorical data is information that fits into finite options in which only one option can be true at…

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What is the mode and how do I use it?

What is the mode and how do I use it?

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The mode is the central tendency measure that indicates the data point that occurs most frequently in a set of scores. It measures the frequency of occurrence of each unique value and denotes the score that has the highest frequency. The data points that the mode can describe can be numeric (e.g., height in cm or weight in pounds) or word-based (e.g., eye color, the city in which you live). The data points are organized somehow, and the frequency of…

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What is the mean and how do I use it?

What is the mean and how do I use it?

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The mean is the most commonly used measure of central tendency and is considered a descriptive statistic. In practical terms, it is the sum of all the values in a data set divided by the number of values. It is a single value that can summarize the value of many of the scores in the data set. It represents the middle of the score distribution, hence the term “measure of central tendency.” A simple version of the formula would be:…

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What are descriptive statistics and how are they used?

What are descriptive statistics and how are they used?

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Descriptive statistics are used to organize, summarize and describe the attributes of a set of data. A set of data, especially numeric data, are often referred to as a distribution. A category of descriptive statistics is those measures that describe a distribution using one measure and can be thought of as describing “middle’ or typical score within a distribution. These measures of central tendency, such as the mean, median, and mode, are typically used as the best summary of a…

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