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Applied Mathematics · Ch 10 — Descriptive Statistics

Measures of Dispersion

10.6

Measures of Dispersion

Dispersion tells you how spread out the data is — it answers the question: are the values clustered tightly around the centre, or scattered far apart? Averages like the mean or median give you a single representative value, but they hide the variability within the data. Measures of dispersion, such as range, variance, and standard deviation, quantify this spread and are essential for comparing the consistency or reliability of differe …