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Q.Mention any two disadvantages of range as a measure of dispersion.

West Bengal WbchseWBCHSE West Bengal HS (Class-12) Commerce Board 2018Subjective· 2mImportance★★★★★est
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Range is a crude measure of dispersion because it uses only the two extreme values and is distorted badly by outliers.

Range is the simplest measure of dispersion, defined as the difference between the maximum and minimum values of a variable (Range = L - S). Despite its simplicity, it has several real drawbacks as a measure of dispersion:

  1. Ignores the distribution of the middle values: Range depends ENTIRELY on the two extreme observations (the highest and the lowest) and completely disregards how the remaining values in the dataset are spread out or clustered. Two very differently distributed datasets can have exactly the same range.
  2. Highly sensitive to outliers: Because it is based only on the extremes, a single unusually large or small observation (an outlier) can sharply inflate the range even when almost all other observations are closely bunched together, giving a misleading picture of the true variability in the data. …

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