ECON 250 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Standard Deviation, Quartile, Normal Distribution

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 250
• Professor: Jason Rhinelander

Document Summary

Cases are the objects described by a set of data: a variable is a characteristic of a case, different cases have different values for the variables. Examples of cases: customers, companies, subjects in a study, or other objects. A label is a special variable used in some data sets to distinguish the different cases. A variable is a characteristic of a case. A categorical variable places a case into one of several groups or categories. A quantitative variable takes numerical values for which arithmetic operations such as adding and averaging make sense. The distribution of a variable tells us what values it takes and how often it takes these values. Look for the overall pattern and striking deviations from that pattern: an important deviation is an outlier, which is an individual value that falls outside the overall pattern. Symmetric distribution: both right & left sides of the histogram are approximately mirror images of each other.