Question

What does measuring the spread of a data set tell us, and why is that significant?

Answer 1

Measuring the spread of a data set tells us how far are the values of data set to respect the mean. For example, large mean absolute deviation (MAD) value indicates that the values of data set are very different from the mean, i. e., they are very spread. Therefore, the mean is not representative of the data. On the other hand, in a small spread case, the mean is representative.

Answer 2

Explanation:

Measure of spread is used in describing the variability in a sample.

Examples of measure of spread are: Mean, Median and Mode.

A measure of spread helps in giving an idea of how well the mean, or mode, or median, whichever of the three measure of spreads we use, represents the data under consideration. If the spread of values in the data set is large, that means there a lot of variation between the values of the data set. It is always better to have a small spread.