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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.
Since the sample does not include all members of the population, statistics of the sample (often known as estimators), such as means and quartiles, generally differ from the statistics of the entire population (known as parameters).
Such variability can be caused by, for example, intra-individual variability and inter-observer variability. A measurement may be said to be repeatable when this variation is smaller than a predetermined acceptance criterion. Test–retest variability is practically used, for example, in medical monitoring of conditions. In these situations ...
Male and female: An experiment is designed to test a new drug on patients. There are two levels of the treatment, drug, and placebo, administered to male and female patients in a double blind trial. The sex of the patient is a blocking factor accounting for treatment variability between males and females. This reduces sources of variability and ...
The validity of a measurement tool (for example, a test in education) is the degree to which the tool measures what it claims to measure. [3] Validity is based on the strength of a collection of different types of evidence (e.g. face validity, construct validity, etc.) described in greater detail below.
In typical use, it is a function of the test used (including the desired level of statistical significance), the assumed distribution of the test (for example, the degree of variability, and sample size), and the effect size of interest. High statistical power is related to low variability, large sample sizes, large effects being looked for ...
Homogeneity can be studied to several degrees of complexity. For example, considerations of homoscedasticity examine how much the variability of data-values changes throughout a dataset. However, questions of homogeneity apply to all aspects of the statistical distributions, including the location parameter
Measurements are usually subject to variation and measurement uncertainty; thus they are repeated and full experiments are replicated to help identify the sources of variation, to better estimate the true effects of treatments, to further strengthen the experiment's reliability and validity, and to add to the existing knowledge of the topic. [19]