[3] Elementary Descripive Statistics

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Elementary Descripive Statistics

Stephen B. Vardeman & J. Marcus Jobe

This chapter is part of: Vardeman S. & Jobe J. 2023. Basic Engineering Data Collection and Analysis

Description
Engineering data are always variable. Given precise enough measurement, even supposedly constant process conditions produce differing responses. Therefore, it is not individual data values that demand an engineer’s attention as much as the pattern or distribution of those responses. The task of summarizing data is to describe their important distributional characteristics. This chapter discusses simple methods that are helpful in this task. The chapter begins with some elementary graphical and tabular methods of data summarization. The notion of quantiles of a distribution is then introduced and used to make other useful graphical displays. Next, standard numerical summary measures of location and spread for quantitative data are discussed. Finally comes a brief look at some elementary methods for summarizing qualitative and count data.

Description

Engineering data are always variable. Given precise enough measurement, even supposedly constant process conditions produce differing responses. Therefore, it is not individual data values that demand an engineer’s attention as much as the pattern or distribution of those responses. The task of summarizing data is to describe their important distributional characteristics. This chapter discusses simple methods that are helpful in this task. The chapter begins with some elementary graphical and tabular methods of data summarization. The notion of quantiles of a distribution is then introduced and used to make other useful graphical displays. Next, standard numerical summary measures of location and spread for quantitative data are discussed. Finally comes a brief look at some elementary methods for summarizing qualitative and count data.

Details

Published	Published By	Pages
Jan. 12, 2023	Iowa State University Digital Press	57
License Information
© 2001 Stephen B. Vardeman and J. Marcus Jobe. Basic Engineering Data Collection and Analysis is available under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) 4.0 International license. You may share and adapt the material, so long as you provide appropriate credit to the original authors, do not use the material for commercial purposes, and any adaptations or remixes of the material which you create are distributed under the same license as the original.
Citation
Vardeman S. & Jobe J. 2023. Elementary Descripive Statistics. In Vardeman S. & Jobe J. 2023. Basic Engineering Data Collection and Analysis