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Questions and Answers
What is a characteristic of a continuous variable?
A ratio scale is the same as an absolute scale.
True
Give an example of an interval scale.
temperature (measured in °C)
On an interval scale, the difference between __________ and __________ is 6 °C.
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Match the following types of scales with their characteristics:
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A temperature of 4 °C is twice as cold as 2 °C.
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What is an example of a ratio scale?
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What is the difference between a ratio scale and an absolute scale?
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60 km/h is __________ times faster than 20 km/h.
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The number of semesters studied is an example of a continuous variable.
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Study Notes
Descriptive Statistics
- Descriptive statistics is a branch of science that deals with the collection, presentation, analysis, and interpretation of data.
- It is the scientific process for making valid decisions in the face of uncertainty.
- It is also referred to as the "Science of processing data".
Areas of Statistical Study
- There are two broad areas of Statistics study:
- Descriptive Statistics: concerned with methods for presenting and summarizing sample data.
- Inferential Statistics: concerned with methods of using the summary information and findings from a sample to draw conclusions about a population.
Role of Statistics
- Statistics plays a key role in various fields, including:
- State economy: provides summary measures of economic variables and acts as a management tool.
- Health, Energy, Environmental Studies, Government, Telecommunication, Transportation, etc.: helps to release the right information needed in policy formation and decision making.
- Risk assessment and dynamics: increasingly used in risk assessment and dynamics.
- Control Theory: essential for every scientist to master these tools.
Statistics in Software Engineering and Computer Science
- Probability and statistics are used throughout engineering to analyze data.
- Statistical methods are used in developing and implementing data-driven technologies.
- Statistics methods provide frameworks that help in identifying trends and patterns in data, useful in business decisions.
- Data science techniques like machine learning and Artificial intelligence rely on statistical tools for analyzing and implementing big data.
Basic Concepts in Statistics
- Observations: the units on which we measure data, such as persons, cars, animals, or plants.
- Population: the collection of all units.
- Sample: a selection of observations from a population.
- Variable: a particular feature of observations that can be collected in a statistical variable X.
Variables
- Qualitative variables: take values that cannot be ordered in a logical or natural way, such as the color of the eye or the name of a political party.
- Quantitative variables: represent measurable quantities, such as the size of shoes or the price of houses.
- Discrete variables: can only take a finite number of values, such as the size of shoes or the number of semesters studied.
- Continuous variables: can take an infinite number of values, such as the time it takes to travel to university or the length of an antelope.
Scales
- Nominal scale: the values of a nominal variable cannot be ordered, such as the gender of a person (male–female) or the status of an application (pending–not pending).
- Ordinal scale: the values of an ordinal variable can be ordered, but the differences between these values cannot be interpreted in a meaningful way, such as the education level (none–primary education–secondary education–university degree).
- Continuous scale: the values of a continuous variable can be ordered, and the differences between these values can be interpreted in a meaningful way, such as the height of a person.
- Interval scale: only differences between values, but not ratios, can be interpreted, such as temperature (measured in °C).
- Ratio scale: both differences and ratios can be interpreted, such as speed.
- Absolute scale: the same as the ratio scale, with the exception that the values are measured in "natural" units, such as the number of semesters studied.
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Description
Test your knowledge of descriptive statistics, a branch of science that deals with collecting, presenting, analyzing, and interpreting data. This quiz covers methods for presenting and summarizing sample data.
