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Measures of Dispersion
These statistics
describe how the data varies or is dispersed (spread out).
The two most commonly
used measures of dispersion are the range and
the standard deviation. Rather than
showing how data are similar, they show how data differs (its variation,
spread, or dispersion).
Quoting both a measure
of central tendency and the relevant measure of dispersion for
one set of data gives a much better picture of the data than quoting
one alone.
Other measures of
dispersion that may be encountered include the Interquartile
range (IQR) and the Semi-interquartile
range (SIQR).
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