Statistical Language Understanding

Statistical Language Understanding

Statistical Language Understanding

Step 1: Define and discuss the following terms using reliable scholarly sources:

Sample

A subset of a population usually chosen in such way that it can be taken to represent the population with respect to some characteristic, for example, height, or cost, or gender, or make of car (Altman, 1991).

Population

The population is the entire set from which one selects a sample to test.

Frequency

Frequency is another term for proportion; it is the value calculated by dividing the number of times an event occurs by the total number of times an experiment is carried out.

Measures of central tendency (mean median & mode)

Several different measures of central tendency are defined below (David Freedman, Robert Pisani and Roger Purves, 2007).

The mode is the most frequently appearing value in the population or sample.

To find the median, we arrange the observations in order from smallest to largest value. If there are an odd number of observations, the median is the middle value. If there is an even number of observations, the median is the average of the two middle values (Gardner, 1989).

The mean of a sample or a population is computed by adding all of the observations and dividing by the number of observations.

Measures of dispersion

Range

The simplest measure of dispersion is the range. The range is calculated by simply taking the difference between the maximum and minimum values in the data set (Gardner, 1989).

Variance and Standard Deviation

A better way to measure dispersion is to square the differences before averaging them. This measure of dispersion is known as the variance, and the square root of the variance is known as the standard deviation. The standard deviation and variance are widely used measures of dispersion (Gardner 1989).

Standard error

The standard error of a statistic is ...