Statistics for Six Sigma Green Belts with Minitab and JMP

Appendix B. Summation Notation

Because the operation of addition occurs so frequently in statistics, the special symbol ∑ is used to mean “take the sum of.” If there is a set of n values for a variable labeled X, the expression means that these n values are to be added together from the first value to the last (n^th) value. Thus:

To illustrate summation notation, suppose there are five values for a variable X:

X₁ = 2 X₂ = 0, X₃ = -1, X₄ = 5, and X₅ = 7.

For these data,

In statistics, it is also often necessary to sum the squared values of a ...