You are working with the text-only light edition of "H.Lohninger: Teach/Me Data Analysis, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-New York-Tokyo, 1999. ISBN 3-540-14743-8". Click here for further information.
| You are working with the text-only light edition of "H.Lohninger: Teach/Me Data Analysis, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-New York-Tokyo, 1999. ISBN 3-540-14743-8". Click here for further information.
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Table of Contents  Univariate Data Measures of Variation Measures of Variation |
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| See also: measures of location |   |
If you are collecting data on a process, it is important to determine not only the location of the mean, but also to look at the variation within the data. If you are, for example, interpreting the results of a chemical analysis, you may put much more emphasis on the obtained average value if you know that the individual samples vary only very little in comparison to the mean.
In general, the spread of a distribution, both in absolute and in relative
terms, is a good measure of the variability (and hence reliability) of
the data. There are several ways to specify the variation in the data:
Last Update: 2006-Jän-17