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Statistics for Decision- Making in Business - Maricopa Community ...

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If the deviations are small (good th<strong>in</strong>g!), then the squared deviations will be small, and so the<br />

sum of squares will be small. This implies a small deviation.<br />

So, a large standard deviation means that there is a lot of variability, or that the values are vastly<br />

different from one another. A small standard deviation means the values <strong>in</strong> the data set are quite<br />

alike. In the near future, you'll see why it is important to have a small standard deviation. In<br />

general, as the variance and standard deviation get larger, our ability to make precise statements<br />

about the population quickly evaporates.<br />

We will be us<strong>in</strong>g variance and standard deviation consistently <strong>for</strong> the rest of the semester. It is<br />

important to get com<strong>for</strong>table with it.<br />

2.4.3 Do Population Variances and Standard Deviations Fall <strong>in</strong>to Play<br />

Indeed they do. Do you th<strong>in</strong>k that we can f<strong>in</strong>d them Def<strong>in</strong>itely not! The population variance<br />

requires the use of the population mean, . How do we get We take the average of all the<br />

values <strong>in</strong> the entire population. S<strong>in</strong>ce we typically don't know this value, we also typically don't<br />

know the population variance, so certa<strong>in</strong>ly we don't know the population standard deviation<br />

(s<strong>in</strong>ce it's the square root of the population variance).<br />

The table below summarizes the notations we need to recognize:<br />

Sample<br />

Population<br />

Variance Standard<br />

Deviation<br />

The population parameter, , is the lowercase Greek letter “Sigma.” (This is as opposed to the<br />

sample statistic, .)<br />

2.4.4 Interquartile Range<br />

The standard deviation, much like the mean, is easily skewed by excessively small or large<br />

values. We noticed this <strong>in</strong> the first example <strong>in</strong> this section. Us<strong>in</strong>g the idea of medians and<br />

percentiles is a safe bet <strong>for</strong> outlier-proof<strong>in</strong>g our spread estimates. An <strong>in</strong>terquartile range is the<br />

difference between the 3 rd quartile and the 1 st quartile. Remember, these are simply the 75 th and<br />

25 th percentiles, respectively. The difference is the middle 50% of the dataset.<br />

<strong>Statistics</strong> <strong>for</strong> <strong>Decision</strong>-<strong>Mak<strong>in</strong>g</strong> <strong>in</strong> Bus<strong>in</strong>ess © Milos Podmanik Page 70

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