Abstract
As a first step toward describing statistics, we examine the way in which numerical data about our world is collected and described. The ideas of a population and taking a sample from that population are introduced, together with ways of displaying this information—the dotplot, histogram and boxplot—and parameters that describe the information, such as means, medians and quartiles. Probability distributions are introduced, as a way of representing the probability model of a phenomenon; in particular, we look at the normal distribution.
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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Wallis, W.D. (2013). Data: Distributions. In: Mathematics in the Real World. Birkhäuser, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8529-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8529-2_4
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Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-8528-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-8529-2
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