Sunday, September 14, 2014

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Statistics is about analyzing data, for instance the mean is commonly used to measure the “central tendency” of the data set (simply the average), or the median that measures the true middle of the data set.  Other basic methods that are fairly intuitive are the mode that finds the value that occurs most often, and the range that measures the difference between the largest and smallest numbers.  Some of the advanced methods that require more complex calculations are the variance, and standard deviation that measure how spread out the numbers are (measure of dispersion).


Why do we need all this?  To be able make decisions or even predictions based on a sample data set alone.  Symbolab now implements quite a few statistics methods to help you sort out the data step by step (No decisions, predications or “lies” just yet…).

Starting with the basics, here’s an example of the mean (click here)


here’s an example of the median (click here)



Let’s step up, here’s an example of the variance (click here)



Standard deviation, piece of cake (click here)



Click here to check the different statistics methods and examples

Cheers,
Michal