The measures of central tendency, such as the mean, median and mode, do not reveal the whole picture of the distribution of a data set. Two data sets with the same mean may have completely different spreads. The variation among the values of observations for one data set may be much larger or smaller than for another data set. Thus, the mean, median or mode by itself is usually not a sufficient measure to reveal the shape of the distribution of a data set. We also need a measure that can provide some information about the variation among data values. These measures are called the measures of dispersion. The measures of central tendency and dispersion taken together give a better picture of a data set than the measures of central tendency alone (Mann 2012).

Citation

The E-Learning project SOGA-R was developed at the Department of Earth Sciences by Kai Hartmann, Joachim Krois and Annette Rudolph. You can reach us via mail by soga[at]zedat.fu-berlin.de.

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You may use this project freely under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Please cite as follow: Hartmann, K., Krois, J., Rudolph, A. (2023): Statistics and Geodata Analysis using R (SOGA-R). Department of Earth Sciences, Freie Universitaet Berlin.