What affects standard deviation?

Learning Outcomes

• Use mean and standard deviation to describe a distribution.

Example

Homework Scores with an Outlier

Here are two summaries of the same set of homework scores earned by a student: a boxplot and an SD hatplot. Notice that the distribution of scores has an outlier. This student has mostly high homework scores with one score of 0. Here are some observations about the homework data.

• Five-number summary: low: 0 Q1: 82 Q2: 84.5 Q3: 89 high: 100
• Median is 84.5 and IQR is 7
• Mean = 81.8, SD = 17.6

The typical range of scores based on the first and third quartiles is 82 to 89.

The typical range of scores based on Mean ± SD is 64.2 to 99.4 (Heres how we calculated this: 81.8 17.6 = 64.2, 81.8 + 17.6 = 99.4.)

Which is the better summary of the students performance on homework?

The typical range based on the mean and standard deviation is not a good summary of this students homework scores. Here we see that the outlier decreases the mean so that the mean is too low to be representative of this students typical performance. We also see that the outlier increases the standard deviation, which gives the impression of a wide variability in scores. This makes sense because the standard deviation measures the average deviation of the data from the mean. So a point that has a large deviation from the mean will increase the average of the deviations. In this example, a single score is responsible for giving the impression that the students typical homework scores are lower than they really are.

The typical range based on the first and third quartiles gives a better summary of this students performance on homework because the outlier does not affect the quartile marks.

Example

Skewed Incomes

In this example, we look at how skewness in a data set affects the standard deviation. The following histogram shows the personal income of a large sample of individuals drawn from U.S. census data in the year 2000. Notice that it is strongly skewed to the right. This type of skewness is often present in data sets of variables such as income.

Following are some summary statistics for this data:

• Mean = $24,000, SD = $27,500
• Median = $16,900, IQR = $28,000

The typical range based on the mean and standard deviation is not a good summary of the distribution of incomes. The small number of people with higher incomes increases the mean. The mean is too high to represent the large number of people making less than $20,000 a year. The small number of people with higher incomes also increase the standard deviation, so a small number of high incomes gives the misleading impression that typical incomes in the sample are higher than they really are.

Notice also that Mean ± SD gives an awkward range of typical values. The left endpoint is at 3,500 (Mean SD = 24,000 27,500 = 3,500), but there are no negative values in this data set. This is another reason why it is better to use the IQR when measuring the spread of a skewed data set.

Lets take a look at the same histogram, except this time we overlay a boxplot.

We see that the median represents the typical income of people in this sample better than the mean. The small number of people with higher incomes does not impact the median or the other quartile marks, so the first and third quartile marks give a range of incomes that more accurately represent typical incomes in the sample. Notice also that this range is always within the overall range of the data, so we will never have the problem that we encountered earlier with the standard deviation.

In a skewed distribution, the upper half and the lower half of the data have a different amount of spread, so no single number such as the standard deviation could describe the spread very well. We get a better understanding of how the values are distributed if we use the quartiles and the two extreme values in the five-number summary.