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Statistics Essentials For Dummies
book

Statistics Essentials For Dummies

by Deborah J. Rumsey
May 2019
Beginner content levelBeginner
192 pages
4h 8m
English
For Dummies
Content preview from Statistics Essentials For Dummies

Chapter 3

Charts and Graphs

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Pie charts and bar graphs for categorical data

Bullet Time charts for time series data

Bullet Histograms and boxplots for numerical data

The main purpose of a data display is to organize and display data to make your point clearly, effectively, and correctly. In this chapter, I present the most common data displays used to summarize categorical and numerical data, thoughts and cautions on their interpretation, and tips for evaluating them.

Pie Charts

A pie chart takes categorical data and shows the percentage of individuals that fall into each category. The sum of all the slices of the pie should be 100% or close to it (with a bit of round-off error). Because a pie chart is a circle, categories can easily be compared and contrasted to one another.

The Florida lottery uses a pie chart to report where your money goes when you purchase a lottery ticket (see Figure 3-1). You can see that half of Florida lottery revenues (50 cents of every dollar spent) goes to prizes, and 38 cents of every dollar goes to education.

Pie chart presenting Florida lottery expenditures for the fiscal year 2001-2002, reporting where all the money goes when a lottery ticket is purchased.

FIGURE 3-1: Florida lottery expenditures ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119590309Purchase book