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In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. [1] Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The term central tendency dates from the late 1920s. [2] The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and ...
In statistics, dispersion (also called variability, scatter, or spread) is the extent to which a distribution is stretched or squeezed. [1] Common examples of measures of statistical dispersion are the variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. For instance, when the variance of data in a set is large, the data is widely scattered.
Descriptive statistics are most often concerned with two sets of properties of a distribution (sample or population): central tendency (or location) seeks to characterize the distribution's central or typical value, while dispersion (or variability) characterizes the extent to which members of the distribution depart from its center and each other.
Several measures of statistical dispersion are defined in terms of the absolute deviation. The term "average absolute deviation" does not uniquely identify a measure of statistical dispersion, as there are several measures that can be used to measure absolute deviations, and there are several measures of central tendency that can be used as well.
The three most frequently used measures of variability are range, variance and standard deviation. [10] The appropriateness of each measure would depend on the type of data, the shape of the distribution of data and which measure of central tendency are being used. If the data is categorical, then there is no measure of variability to report.
Some measures that are commonly used to describe a data set are measures of central tendency and measures of variability or dispersion. Measures of central tendency include the mean, median and mode, while measures of variability include the standard deviation (or variance), the minimum and maximum values of the variables, kurtosis and skewness ...
Retail reading. The final monthly retail sales report before the start of the holiday shopping season is set for release on Thursday. Economists estimate retail sales increased 0.3% over the prior ...
A truncated mean or trimmed mean is a statistical measure of central tendency, much like the mean and median. It involves the calculation of the mean after discarding given parts of a probability distribution or sample at the high and low end, and typically discarding an equal amount of both. This number of points to be discarded is usually ...