Statistics- The Science of Average and Estimates

The digital era nowadays is filled with a huge amount of information in the form of data, facts, and figures that may seem overwhelming at times. The facts and figures are generally provided by the internet, TV, financial magazines, and other print media. For example, the profit or loss of an organization, election results, Data regarding the spread of the pandemic, expenditure incurred by various government departments in the current financial year, and so on. The collection, analysis, interpretation, and organization of information for a specific purpose is known as statistics. The different perspectives of the same data are shown with the help of mean, median, and mode which are explained in detail by experienced teachers at Cuemath.

Statistics are generally used to analyze demographic data, experimental data by scientists, unemployment data, sales trends of different companies, and analysis of data for strategic business planning.

Here are a few terms that you come across while studying statistics:

• The difference between the minimum and the maximum values of a particular data is called the Range of the data.
• Data that has been systematically arranged in ascending or descending order is called an Array.
• Data arranged in a manner to study its features is called the presentation of Data.
• A grouped frequency distribution table shows the frequencies of groups of values of a given data.
• A group of values in a given data is called Class.
• The lower value in a class is called the lower class limit while the upper value is called the upper-class limit.
• The mid-value of the upper and the lower limit of a class is called the class mark.
• The pictorial representation of data using rectangular bars is called a Bar graph. The rectangular bars are placed on the x-axis while the variable is shown on the y-axis.
• Mean is the sum of all the values in a data divided by the number of values.
• The Median is the mid-point in a data set with an equal number of values above and below it.
• The value that has the maximum frequency is known as Mode.
• A mode Formula is used to find the mode of a grouped or non-grouped data.

Let us look at some of the applications of Mean, Median, and Mode

• Mean, median, and mode are used to show the different perspectives of the same data.
• Mean is used to find the average of a given data. It is generally used in cases where all data is important to consider, for example, the average salary of people working in an organization.
• Median is the mid-point of data. It is generally used when extreme cases may be ignored. For example, it can be used to find the consistent performance of a player while his worst and best performance can be ignored.
• Mode is used in cases where we need to find the most frequent data. For example, we can use mode to find the most loved author by the students in a class.

Here are a few Real-Life Examples where mean, median, and mode are used to describe a dataset

1. Human Resource department – Human resource managers are responsible for disbursing salaries and they calculate the mean salary of employees in a particular department to get an idea about how much salary to offer new employees. They also calculate the mode of different profiles to get an idea about the most common profile in the organization.
2. Marketing Industry – Companies invest a lot of money in advertising their products. They often calculate the mean profit generated from a certain advertisement. They also use the concept of mode to find out which type of Ad their company uses most of the time.
3. Real Estate Sector – Real estate agents calculate the mean value of houses in a certain area so that they can inform the prospective buyers about the prices. They also find out the typical price of a house in that area by calculating the median price. The mode formula is used to calculate the number of rooms in a house to inform the buyers about the number of rooms to expect in general.