MEASURES OF

DISPERSION
Measures of Dispersion

 Another important characteristic of a data

set is how it is distributed, or how far each
element is from some measure of central
tendency (average).
 There are several ways to measure the
variability of the data.
RANGE

 Probably the simplest and easiest way to

determine measure of dispersion is the range: (i)
it is easy to compute and (ii) it is easy to
understand.
 It also has two disadvantages, it can be distorted
by a single extreme value and only two values are
used in the calculation.
 Range = Highest Value (HV) – Lowest Value (LV)
VARIANCE

 The variance for a given data set is the square of

the standard deviation of the data.
STANDARD DEVIATION

 The standard deviation is a measure of how

spread out numbers are.
 Its symbol is σ (the greek letter sigma)
MEASURES OF RELATIVE
POSITION
QUARTILES

 When presenting or analyzing data set it is

sometimes helpful to group subjects into several
equal groups.
 The cut off points are called quartiles
 Deciles
 Percentiles
Where: Q = quartile
i = quartile location
n = population
z-Score

 z-score is used to know the position of one

observation relative to others in a set of data.
 A z-score measures the distance between an
observation and the mean, measured in units of
standard deviation.
BOX-AND-WHISKER PLOT

A boxplot is graph of a data set obtained by

drawing a horizontal line from the
minimum data value to first quartile,
drawing a horizontal line to third quartile
to the maximum data value.
CORRELATION AND
LINEAR
REGRESSION
CORRELATION
■ Correlation is a statistical method used to determine
whether a relationship between variables exists.

REGRESSION
■ Regression analysis is a statistical method used to describe
the nature of the relationship between variables, that is,
either positive or negative, linear or nonlinear.
PEARSON PRODUCT – MOMENT
CORRELATION
■ Pearson product – moment correlation is the most widely
used in statistics to measure the degree of the relationship
between the linear related variables.
■ Pearson’s product – moment correlation coefficient of
simply correlation coefficient is a measure of the linear
strength of the association between two variables. The
value of the correlation coefficient varies between +1 and
-1.
SIMPLE LINEAR REGRESSION ANALYSIS

■ Regression analysis is a simple statistical tool used to

model the dependence of a variable to one (or more)
explanatory variables.
■ A simple linear regression is the least estimator of a linear
regression model.