Now that you have worked with various means of displaying your data, we will shift to considering how to describe that data. Descriptive statistics provide us with a formal means of doing exactly that. Here, we will consider central tendency and variation.
Descriptive Statistics
Measures of Center
What we are looking for with central tendency is the center of the distribution of a variable, i.e. a typical value of the variable. In high school, you may have seen some discussion of mean, median, and mode. We are revisiting those same descriptive statistics! Example With respect to fiddler crabs, perhaps we are interested…
Variation
One of the most important aspects of biology is considering the variation (or spread) of our observations around the mean. There are a number of ways in which we might consider this variation. Explore some of the measures of variation: Variance Standard Deviation Standard Error
Distributions
Distributions When we collect data on a random variable, there is typically a range of values in which that variable may fall. Certain values may be more common than others. To explore this pattern, we can construct a probability distribution, with values of the variable on the horizontal axis and probability of obtaining each value…