116k views
3 votes
Provide an alternative definition of variability and elucidate how it can be calculated.

User Emartel
by
8.0k points

1 Answer

4 votes

Final answer:

Variability refers to the degree to which data points in a dataset differ from each other. It is a measure of how spread out or dispersed the data is. The most common measure to calculate variability is the standard deviation.

Step-by-step explanation:

Alternative definition of variability:

Variability refers to the degree to which data points in a dataset differ from each other. It is a measure of how spread out or dispersed the data is. Variability quantifies the amount of diversity or variation present in a set of data.

How to calculate variability:

There are several ways to calculate variability, but the most common measure is the standard deviation (SD). The formula for calculating the sample standard deviation is as follows:

Step 1: Calculate the mean (average) of the data.

Step 2: Subtract the mean from each data point, and square the result.

Step 3: Calculate the sum of all the squared differences from step 2.

Step 4: Divide the sum obtained in step 3 by the number of data points minus 1 (for a sample) or by the number of data points (for a population).

Step 5: Take the square root of the result from step 4 to find the standard deviation.

Other measures of variability include the range, which is the difference between the highest and lowest values in a dataset, and the interquartile range (IQR), which is the difference between the first quartile (Q1) and third quartile (Q3) in a dataset. These measures give additional information about the spread of data.

User Pradip Karki
by
8.7k points
Welcome to QAmmunity.org, where you can ask questions and receive answers from other members of our community.