Very Basic Statistics

Course Content

• Data Types

• Descriptive Statistics

• Data Displays
Data Types
 Variables

• Quantitative Variable
• A variable that is counted or measured on a
numerical scale
• Can be continuous or discrete (always a whole
number).

• Qualitative Variable
• A non-numerical variable that can be classified into
categories, but can’t be measured on a numerical
scale.
• Can be nominal or ordinal
 Continuous Data

• Continuous data is measured on a scale.

• The data can have almost any numeric value
and can be recorded at many different points.

• For example
• Temperature (39.25oC)
• Time (2.468 seconds)
• Height (1.25m)
• Weight (66.34kg)
 Discrete Data

• Discrete data is based on counts, for example;

• The number of cars parked in a car park

• The number of patients seen by a dentist each day.

• Only a finite number of values are possible e.g.

a dentist could see 10, 11, 12 people but not
12.3 people
 Nominal Data

• A Nominal scale is the most basic level of measurement.

The variable is divided into categories and objects are
‘measured’ by assigning them to a category.

• For example,
• Colours of objects (red, yellow, blue, green)
• Types of transport (plane, car, boat)

• There is no order of magnitude to the categories i.e.

blue is no more or less of a colour than red.
 Ordinal Data

• Ordinal data is categorical data, where the categories

can be placed in a logical order of ascendance e.g.;
• 1 – 5 scoring scale, where 1 = poor and 5 = excellent
• Strength of a curry (mild, medium, hot)

• There is some measure of magnitude, a score of ‘5 –

excellent’ is better than a score of ‘4 – good’.
• But this says nothing about the degree of difference
between the categories i.e. we cannot assume a
customer who thinks a service is excellent is twice as
happy as one who thinks the same service is good.
 Task 1

• Look at the following variables and decide if they are

qualitative or quantitative, ordinal, nominal, discrete
or continuous

• Age
• Year of birth
• Sex
• Height
• Number of staff in a department
• Time taken to get to work
• Preferred strength of coffee
• Company size
Descriptive Statistics
 Session Content

• Measures of Location

• Measures of Dispersion
Measures of Location
 Common Measures

• Measures of location summarise the data with

a single number
• There are three common measures of location
• Mean
• Mode
• Median

• Quartiles are another measure

 Mean

• The mean (more precisely, the arithmetic mean) is

commonly called the average
• In formulas the mean is usually represented by x
read as ‘x-bar’.
• The formula for calculating the mean from ‘n’ individual
data-points is;

x  x
n
X bar equals the sum of the data divided by the
number of data-points
 Pro’s & Con’s
• Advantages • Disadvantages
– It may not be an actual
‘meaningful’ value, e.g. an
– basic calculation is easily average of 2.4 children per
understood family.
– Can be greatly affected by
extreme values in a dataset. e.g.
– all data values are used in the seven students take a test and
calculation receive the following scores.
40 42 45 50 53 54 99
– The average score is 54.7 – but
– used in many statistical is this really representative of the
procedures. group?

– If the extreme value of 99 is

dropped, the average falls to
47.3
 Mode

• The mode represents the most commonly occurring

value within a dataset.

• We usually find the mode by creating a frequency

distribution in which we tally how often each value
occurs.

• If we find that every value occurs only once, the distribution

has no mode.

• If we find that two or more values are tied as the most

common, the distribution has more than one mode.
 Pro’s & Con’s
• Advantages • Disadvantages
– easy to understand
– not all sets of data have a modal
– not affected by outliers value
(extreme values)

– can also be obtained for – some sets of data have more

qualitative data than one modal value

e.g. when looking at the

frequency of colours of cars – multiple modal values are often
we may find that silver occurs difficult to interpret
most often
 Task 2

• The following values are the ages of students in their

first year of a course

18, 19, 18, 25, 22, 20, 21, 45, 33, 20, 18, 18

• Find the mean age of the students

• Find the modal value
• In your opinion which is the better measure of location
for this data set?
 Median

• Median means middle, and the median is the middle of

a set of data that has been put into rank order.

• Specifically, it is the value that divides a set of data into

two halves, with one half of the observations being
larger than the median value, and one half smaller.

Half the data < 29 Half the data > 29

18 24 29 30 32
 Finding the Median from Individual
Data
• Step 1:- Arrange the observations in increasing order i.e.
rank order. The median will be the number that corresponds
to the middle rank.

• Step 2:- Find the middle rank with the following formula:
Middle rank = ½*(n+1)

• Step 3 – Identify the value of the median

• If ‘n’ is an odd number the middle rank will fall on an
observation. The median is then the value of that
observation.
 Finding the Median from Individual
Data
• If ‘n’ is an even number, the middle rank will fall between
two observations. In this case the median is equal to the
arithmetic mean of the values of the two observations

40 42 45 50 53 54 70 99

Position of Median = ½*(n+1) = 4.5

data - point 4  data - point 5

Median =
2
50  53
 51.5
Median = 2
 Pro’s & Con’s
• Advantages • Disadvantages

– the concept is easy to – data must be arranged in rank

understand
– the median can be
determined for any type of
data (with the exception of
nominal)
order (ascending or
descending)
– cannot combine medians in
statistical calculations as with
mean values

– the median is not unduly

influenced by extreme values
in the dataset
 Task 3

• Using the student age data below, find the

median age

18, 19, 18, 25, 22, 20, 21, 45, 33, 20, 18, 18
 Quartiles

• Also known as percentiles

• Lower quartile - 25% of the data is below this
• Position of Q1 = ¼*(n+1)

• Upper quartile – 75% of the data is below this

• Position of Q3 = ¾*(n+1)

• If a quartile falls on an observation, the value of the

quartile is the value of that observation.
• For example, if the position of a quartile is 20, its value is
the value of the 20th observation.
 Quartiles

• If a quartile lies between observations, the value of the

quartile is the value of the lower observation plus the
specified fraction of the difference between the two
observations.

40 42 45 50 53 54 70 99
Position of Upper Quartile = ¾*(n+1) = 6.75
Upper quartile = data-point 6 + 0.75*(data-point 7 – data-point 6)
Upper quartile = 54 + 0.75*(70 – 54) = 66
 Task 4

• Using the student age data below find the

upper and lower quartiles

18, 19, 18, 25, 22, 20, 21, 45, 33, 20, 18, 18
Measures of Dispersion
 Common Measures

• The dispersion in a set of data is the variation among

the set of data values.

• It measures whether they are all close together, or

more scattered.

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 2 4 6 8 10 12
Report turnaround time (days) Report turnaround time (days)
 Common Measures

• The four common measures of spread are

• the range
• the inter-quartile range
• the variance
• the standard deviation
 Range

• The range is the difference between the largest and the

smallest values in the dataset i.e. the maximum
difference between data-points in the list.
• It is sensitive to only the most extreme values in the list.
The range of a list is 0 if and only if all the data-points
in the list are equal.

4 16 Days
Range
 Pro’s & Con’s
• Advantages • Disadvantages

– best for symmetric data – doesn’t use all of the

with no outliers data, only the extremes

– easy to compute and – very much affected if the

understand extremes are outliers

– good option for ordinal – only shows maximum

data spread, does not show
shape
 Task 5

• Using the student age data find the range of

the data.

18, 19, 18, 25, 22, 20, 21, 45, 33, 20, 18, 18
 Inter-quartile Range

• (upper quartile – lower quartile)

• Essentially describes how much the middle 50% of
your dataset varies

• example: if all patients in a dentist surgery took more-

or-less the same time to be treated with only one or
two exceptionally quick or long appointments you
would expect the inter-quartile range to be very small

• but if all appointments were either very quick or very

long, with few in between then the inter-quartile
range would be larger.
 Pro’s & Con’s
• Advantages
– Good for ordinal data
– Ignores extreme values
– More stable than the range
because it ignores outliers
• Disadvantages
– Harder to calculate and
understand
– Doesn’t use all the
information (ignores half of
the data-points, not just the
outliers)
• Tails almost always matter in
data and these aren’t
included
• Outliers can also sometimes
matter and again these aren’t
included.
 Task 6

• Using the student age data find the inter-

quartile range.

18, 19, 18, 25, 22, 20, 21, 45, 33, 20, 18, 18
 Variance and Standard Deviation

(s2, s2) =(population notation, sample notation)

• The variance (s2, s2) and standard deviation (s, s)
are measures of the deviation or dispersion of
observations (x) around the mean (m) of a
distribution
• Variance is an ‘average’ squared deviation from
the mean
 Variance and Standard Deviation

• The standard deviation (SD) is the square root of the

variance.
• small SD = values cluster closely around the mean
• large SD = values are scattered

1 SD Mean 1 SD
Mean
1 SD 1 SD

4 6 8 10 12 14 16 Days 8 10 12
 Variance and Standard Deviation

• The following formulae define these measures

Population Sample

Variance  s 2 
  x  m ) 2

Variance  s 2 
 x  x) 2

N n 1
Standard Deviation  s  s 2 Standard Deviation  s  s 2
 Variance

• Advantages:
• uses all of the data values

• Disadvantages:
• the variance is measured in the original units
squared
• extreme values or outliers effect the variance
considerably
• hard to calculate manually
 Standard Deviation

• Advantages:
• same units of measurement as the values
• useful in theoretical work and statistical methods
and inference

• Disadvantages:
• hard to calculate manually
 Task 7

• Using the student age data find the variance

and the standard deviation

18, 19, 18, 25, 22, 20, 21, 45, 33, 20, 18, 18
 Session Summary
• Measures of Location
• Mean
• Mode
• Median
• Quartiles

• Measures of Dispersion
• Range
• Interquartile Range
• Variance
• Standard Deviation
Data Displays
 Session Content
– Histograms
– Run charts
– Box plots
– Bar charts
– Pareto charts
– Pie charts
– Scatter plots
– Contingency tables
 Histograms

Histogram of dataset 1 (normal)

30

25

20
Frequency

15

10

0
45.0 52.5 60.0 67.5 75.0 82.5 90.0
dataset 1 (normal)
 Run Charts
Time Series Plot of Time Taken

35.0

32.5
Time Taken

30.0

27.5

25.0

mon tue wed thu fri mon tue wed thu fri mon tue wed thu fri mon tue wed thu fri
Day
 Boxplots
Boxplot of dataset 1 (norma, dataset 2 (expon, dataset 3 (unifo

400

300
Data

200

100

dataset 1 (normal) dataset 2 (exponential) dataset 3 (uniform)

 Bar Charts

Chart of Frequency
20

15
Frequency

10

0
missed dose wrong patient wrong dose wrong time wrong medicine
Causes of Medication Errors
 Pareto Charts

Pareto Chart of Causes of Medication Errors

40 100

80
30
Frequency

Percent
60
20
40

10
20

0 0
Causes of Medication Errors se e e nt he
r
do tim icin it e t
ng ng ed pa O
ro ro m ng
w w ng ro
ro w
w
Frequency 18 15 4 2 1
Percent 45.0 37.5 10.0 5.0 2.5
Cum % 45.0 82.5 92.5 97.5 100.0
 Pie Charts

Pie Chart of Causes of Medication Errors

Category
missed dose
1, 2.5% wrong patient
4, 10.0% 2, 5.0%
wrong dose
wrong time
wrong medicine

15, 37.5%
18, 45.0%
 Scatterplots

Scatterplot of Weight Loss vs Time on Diet

80

70

60

50
Weight Loss

40

30

20

10

0
0 5 10 15 20 25
Time on Diet
 Contingency Tables

Colour of eyes
Colour of hair Brown Green/grey Blue Total
Black 50 54 41 145
Brown 38 46 48 132
Fair 22 30 31 83
Ginger 10 10 20 40
Total 120 140 140 400=N
 Session Summary
– Histograms
– Run charts
– Box plots
– Bar charts
– Pareto charts
– Pie charts
– Scatter plots
– Contingency tables
 Course Summary

• Data Types

• Descriptive Statistics

• Data Displays