What are the uses of measures of dispersion?
Category:
science
physics
Introduction. A measure of spread, sometimes also called a measure of dispersion, is used to describe the variability in a sample or population. It is usually used in conjunction with a measure of central tendency, such as the mean or median, to provide an overall description of a set of data.
Hereof, why do we use measures of dispersion?
While measures of central tendency are used to estimate "normal" values of a dataset, measures of dispersion are important for describing the spread of the data, or its variation around a central value. Two distinct samples may have the same mean or median, but completely different levels of variability, or vice versa.
Keeping this in consideration, what are the common measures of dispersion?
Common examples of measures of statistical dispersion are the variance, standard deviation, and interquartile range. Dispersion is contrasted with location or central tendency, and together they are the most used properties of distributions.
Standard deviation