14 Descriptive Statistics CONCLUSION Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 2 Themes of Chapter 14 Whether we like it or not as we navigate through life in the information age we are awash in a sea of data Today data are the common currency of scientific social and economic discourse Powerful satellites constantly scan our planet collecting prodigious amounts of weather geological and geographical data Government agencies such as the Bureau of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics collect millions of numbers a year about our living working spending and dying habits Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 3 Themes of Chapter 14 Even in our less serious pursuits such as sports we are flooded with data not all of it great Faced with the common problem of data overload statisticians and scientists have devised many ingenious ways to organize display and summarize large amounts of data In this chapter we discussed some of the basic concepts in this area of statistics Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 4 Themes of Chapter 14 Graphical summaries of data can be produced by bar graphs pictograms pie charts histograms and so on There are many other types of graphical descriptions that we did not discuss in the chapter The kind of graph that is the most appropriate for a situation depends on many factors and creating a good picture of a data set is as much an art as a science Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 5 Themes of Chapter 14 Numerical summaries of data when properly used help us understand the overall pattern of a data set without getting bogged down in the details They fall into two categories 1 measures of location such as the average the median and the quartiles and 2 measures of spread such as the range the interquartile range and the standard deviation Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 6 Themes of Chapter 14 Sometimes we even combine numerical summaries and graphical displays as in the case of the box plot We touched upon all of these in this chapter but the subject is a big one and by necessity we only scratched the surface Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 7 Themes of Chapter 14 In this day and age we are all consumers of data and at one time or another we are likely to be providers of data as well Thus understanding the basics of how data are organized and summarized has become an essential requirement for personal success and good citizenship Copyright 2010 Pearson Education Inc Excursions in Modern Mathematics 7e 14 Conclusion 8
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