11MEASURING THE SPREAD OF OUR DATA
In this chapter, you’ll learn three different methods—mean absolute deviation, variance, and standard deviation—for quantifying the spread, or the different extremes, of your observations.
In the previous chapter, you learned that the mean is the best way to guess the value of an unknown measurement, and that the more spread out our observations, the more uncertain we are about our estimate of the mean. As an example, if we’re trying to figure out the location of a collision between two cars based only on the spread of the remaining debris after the cars have been towed away, then the more spread out the debris, ...
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