Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Measures of Location
• Weighted Mean
• Median
• Mode
• Geometric Mean
Measures of Dispersion
Example:
Example:
In the morning class (AM) the students' ages are 18, 20, 21,
21, 23, and 23 years.
In the evening class (PM) the ages are 17, 17, 18, 20, 25, and
29 years.
Note that for both classes the mean age is 21 years but there is more
variation or dispersion in the ages of the evening students.
• Let’s say, around the arithmetic mean. Thus the mean is considered
representative of the data, that is, it is reliable.
Measures of Dispersion
• Range
• Mean Deviation
• Variance
• Standard Deviation
However there are several others measures of location that are used to
• Quartiles
• Deciles
• Percentiles
Quartiles
We know that median divides data in to two halves (once data has been
placed in order from smallest to largest) So for Median, half the values
are below the median and half are above the median
• If we further divide the lower half of the values and upper half set
of the values into two equal parts, we have quartiles.
The values corresponding to Q1, Q2 and Q3 divide a set of data into four
equal parts.
Deciles
Example
Percentiles
Likewise the quartiles that divide the data in to 4 equal parts and the
deciles that divide the data in to 10 equal parts, percentiles divide a
distribution into 100 equal parts.
Example
Location of a Percentile
P
L p = (n + 1) [4 − 1]
100
Where:
Example
• We know that first quartile (Q1) is such a point below which 25%
of the data observations lie
• The formula for Location of a Percentile works well here i.e.
P
L p = ( n +1)
100
So
25 25
L25 = (n + 1) = (79 + 1) = 20
100 100
75 75
L75 = ( n + 1) = (79 + 1) = 60
100 100
so 60th observation is Q3
Example
78 78
L78 = (n + 1) = (49 + 1) = 39
100 100
P
L p = ( n +1)
100
60 60
L60 = (n + 1) = (49 + 1) = 30
100 100