Chapter 2 Flashcards
What’s a variable?
characteristic of a person or thing that can be assigner a number or category
What is a categorical variable?
-no obvious order
-blood type, gender, colors
What is a numeric variable?
can be ordered
What is a discrete numeric variable?
-no fractions, whole numbers
-number of children, length of DNA sequence n basepairs
-number of classes
What is a continuous numeric variable?
-does have fractions
-weight of a baby, cholesterol concentration in blood sample, height
What is an observational unit?
-sometimes we sample n persons or things and collect multiple variables for each
-so the sample is the observational unit
How can a frequency distribution be displayed?
a table or even a bar chart
When making figures and comparing multiple figures what should you do?
-always label the axes, check the axes
What is relative frequency?
count divided by the sample size
CDC versus NYT figures
-CDC shows a smooth transition time wise and this figure only shows two age groups while the NYT shows a range of ages
Dotplot example
Histogram example
What is the area of one or several bars proportional to in a histogram?
the corresponding frequency
What decision do we have to make with continuous numeric variables?
how to group the data
What are the characteristics of a bell-shaped curve? (Gaussian or normal)
symmetric and unimodal
What does a bimodal figure look like?
e.g. male and female height cause two modes
What does an asymmetric graph that is skewed to the right look like?
What does an asymmetric graph skewed to the left?
What does an exponential figure look like and what is an example?
e.g. wait times
What is a statistic?
-a numeric measure calculated from sample data
What is the median?
-a measure of center and is the value that most nearly lies in the middle of the sample
What is the mean?
average
What does it mean if a statistic is robust and are the mean and median robust?
-relatively unaffected by changes in a small portion of the data
-median is unchanged meaning it is robust
-mean changes so it is not robust
What is another measure of center?
trimmed mean
What are the characteristics of a box plot?
-the median splits the distribution into two parts (upper and lower)
-the quartile splits each of these parts in half
-the first quartile Q1 splits the lower, and
-the third quartile Q3 splits the upper
What is the interquartile range? (IQR)
the difference between the third and first quartiles