Question

When data is collected, the most common calculations computed are the Measures of Central Tendency, mean, median and mode. It is important to know how to compute these values and it is also extremely important to know what these values mean in the context of the data set.

Use the internet to find a data set. Key terms to search: Free Public Data Sets and Medical Data Sets.

1. Introduce your Data Set and Cite the Source.
2. Why was this data interesting to you?
3. Calculate measures of central tendency (Mean, Median & Mode) and measures of variation (Range and Standard Deviation) for your data. Write a sentence for each calculation explaining what that value means in the context of your data.

Answer 1

Download the data from the following site.

https://perso.telecom-paristech.fr/eagan/class/igr204/datasets

Cars: A dataset of about 400 cars with 8 characteristics such as horsepower, acceleration, etc.

Download csv file.

Observations about the data

MPG
The mean and median are almost equal and hence we can expected the data to be normally distributed.
Most of the cars have an MPG of 13.

Cylinders
We find the median and mode are equal. However there are some cars which have a higher number of cylinders due to which the overall value of the mean is higher than the median or the mode.

Displacement
We find the standard deviation is very high, hence we find a very high variability in the data for this variable.
The mean and median lower than the mode, indicate the distribution is right skewed.

Horsepower
We find the mode is greater than median and mean, indicating that the data is left skewed.

Weight
Here we find the mean and median are almost equal and we can expect the data to be normal distributed.