Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
The median absolute deviation is a measure of statistical dispersion. Moreover, the MAD is a robust statistic, being more resilient to outliers in a data set than the standard deviation. In the standard deviation, the distances from the mean are squared, so large deviations are weighted more heavily, and thus outliers can heavily influence it ...
For example, five-, seven- and nine-point scales with a uniform distribution of responses give PCIs of 0.60, 0.57 and 0.50 respectively. The first of these problems is relatively minor as most ordinal scales with an even number of response can be extended (or reduced) by a single value to give an odd number of possible responses.
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.
An advantage of variance as a measure of dispersion is that it is more amenable to algebraic manipulation than other measures of dispersion such as the expected absolute deviation; for example, the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables is equal to the sum of their variances. A disadvantage of the variance for practical applications ...
One version of this is to use covariance matrices as the multivariate measure of dispersion. Several authors have considered tests in this context, for both regression and grouped-data situations. [ 28 ] [ 29 ] Bartlett's test for heteroscedasticity between grouped data, used most commonly in the univariate case, has also been extended for the ...
In probability theory and statistics, the index of dispersion, [1] dispersion index, coefficient of dispersion, relative variance, or variance-to-mean ratio (VMR), like the coefficient of variation, is a normalized measure of the dispersion of a probability distribution: it is a measure used to quantify whether a set of observed occurrences are clustered or dispersed compared to a standard ...
Robust measures of scale can be used as estimators of properties of the population, either for parameter estimation or as estimators of their own expected value.. For example, robust estimators of scale are used to estimate the population standard deviation, generally by multiplying by a scale factor to make it an unbiased consistent estimator; see scale parameter: estimation.