Statistics 11

Learning about Statistics is critically important

Populations and Samples

Data may be collected from either a population or a sample. A population consists of all the items or
individuals about which you want to reach conclusions. All the full-time students enrolled in a college,
and all the registered voters in Punjab are examples of populations.

A sample is a portion of population selected for analysis. For example, a sample of 50 full-time students
and a sample of 500 registered voters in Punjab. Selecting a sample is less time consuming and less
costly. It is also more practical to analyzing the sample.

Establishing the variable type

Knowing the variable type is important. There are two major variable types:

Qualitative Variables (also known as categorical variables) have values that can only be placed into
categories such as yes and no.

“Do you have a Facebook profile?” (Yes or no), student class designation (First Year, second Year),
product satisfaction, faculty rank, course grade and cellular provider are all examples of categorical
variables.

Quantitative Variables (also known as numerical variables) have values that represent quantities.

Numerical variables are further identified as being either discrete or continuous variables.

Discrete variables have numerical values that rise from a counting process. “The number of items
purchased”, “the number of premium cable channels subscribed to” and ‘’how many text messages
have you sent in past three days?’’ are all examples of discrete numerical variables

Continuous variables produce numerical responses that arise from a measuring process. The time you
wait for teller service at a bank, file download time, are all examples of continuous numerical variable
because the response takes on any value within an interval.

5 important tasks to apply statistics

1. Define the Variables that you want to study to solve a problem or meet an objective
2. Collect the data for those variables from appropriate sources. Collecting data is a critical task.
Data collection consists of identifying data sources, deciding whether the data you collect will be
from population or a sample and cleaning your data.
3. Organize the data collected by developing tables
4. Visualize the data collected by developing charts
5. Analyze the data collected to reach conclusions and present those results
 Representation of Data

Introduction:

Most scientific experiments result in the collection of data. To extract Information from the sample,
there is need to organize and summarize the data. Commonly, we use either a graph or numerical
measures which summarize the properties of the sample such as its centre and spread. The
diagrammatic representation of a set of data can give us some impressions about its
distribution. Even then, there remains a need for a single quantitative measure which could be
used to indicate the center of the distribution.
Central Tendency:

Most sets of data shows a distinct tendency to group around a central value. When people talk about
central value an ‘’average value’’, or the middle value or the most frequent value , they are talking
informally about the mean, median, and mode- mainly three measures of central tendency. These
measures are single values, which represent the given data and are also known as averages or
measures of location or measures of central tendency.
Arithmetic Mean:
Arithmetic Mean is a measure that determines a value of the variable by adding up all the
observations and dividing the sum by the total number of observations. It is the most common
measure of central tendency. In computing the mean, all values play an equal role.

Computation of Arithmetic Mean:

There are two types of data, ungrouped and grouped. We, therefore have different methods to
determine mean for the two types of data.
Example 1: The marks of seven students in Mathematics are as follows. Calculate the arithmetic
mean and interpret the result.

Marks 45 60 74 58 65 63 48

Solution: 59 Marks
Example 2: Following are the data on students’ heights.

Height 87 91 89 88 89 91 87 92 90 98

Solution: There are ten observations and their sum is 902. Arithmetic mean = 90.20 cm.
Example 3: A variable X takes the following values 4, 5, 8, 6, 2. Find mean of X. Also find the
mean when (a) 5 is added to each observation (b) 10 is multiplied with each observation (c)
Prove sum of the deviation from mean is zero.
Solution: 5, 10 and 50
Grouped Data: A data in the form of frequency distribution is called grouped data.
Classification:

The term classification is the process of arranging observations into different classes according to some
common characteristics.

When data is classified according to one characteristic, it is called one-way classification. When the data
is classified by two characteristics at a time, it is called two-way classification.

Tabulation and frequency distribution

The process of making tables or arranging data into rows and columns is called tabulation.

A frequency distribution is a compact form of data in a table which displays the categories of
observations according to their magnitudes and frequencies such that the similar or identical numerical
values are grouped together. The number of values falling in a particular category is called the frequency
of that category. It is usually denoted by f.

For Discrete data:

In case of discrete data, the categories are placed in a column and a tally count is made for each
category going through the data set which gives the frequency of each category.

Example: The observations about the number of rotten potatoes from twenty equal sized samples taken
from a store are available as follows: l,2,4,3,0, 1,2,3, 1, l,0,2, l,0,2,3,0,0, 1,3

Make a frequency table

Solution: The tally count and frequency table is made by going through each observation of the ·data
and for each observation making a mark, vertical bar I against the appropriate value of the variable. In
this data, the values of the variable vary from 0 to 4. These are written in a column and a tally count is
kept going through the whole data. The resulting frequency distribution is given in Table A.

Table A: Tally count and frequency distribution.

Number of rotten potatoes Tally Frequency (ʄ)

0 |||| 5
1 |||| | 6
2 |||| 4
3 |||| 4
 4 | 1
Total ∑ ʄ =20