2.2 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data
For data preprocessing to be successful, it is essential to have an overall picture of your data. Basic statistical descriptions can be used to identify properties of the data and highlight which data values should be treated as noise or outliers.
This section discusses three areas of basic statistical descriptions. We start with measures of central tendency (Section 2.2.1), which measure the location of the middle or center of a data distribution. Intuitively speaking, given an attribute, where do most of its values fall? In particular, we discuss the mean, median, mode, and midrange.
In addition to assessing the central tendency of our data set, we also would like to have an idea of the dispersion ...
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