Introduction to Measures of Spread

What you’ll learn to do: Use a five-number summary and a boxplot to describe a distribution.

In this section, we define ways to measure the spread of the data. If our measure of center is the median, we will use a visual interpretation with boxplots. If our measure of center is the mean, we will use something called standard deviation. In analyzing quantitative data, the measure of spread will be another key component.

This is an image of a standard box and whisker plot.

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