A.6. Measures of dispersion
In addition to summarizing the center of a distribution, it’s often important to also summarize how dispersed or spread out the values of the distribution are. There are many different measures of dispersion that tell us slightly different information and are appropriate in different situations, but they all give us an indication as to how skinny or wide our distribution of values is. I’m going to remind you of four of these: mean absolute deviation, standard deviation, variance, and the interquartile range.
A.6.1. Mean absolute deviation
Let’s start by talking about what I mean by the word deviation (this isn’t the same meaning as your grandparents might use when chastising immoral behavior). The deviation of an element ...
Get Machine Learning with R, the tidyverse, and mlr now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
