Читать книгу Medical Statistics - David Machin - Страница 47

The simplest way to describe the spread of a data set is to quote the minimum (lowest) and maximum (highest) values. The range is given as the smallest and largest observations. For some data it is very useful, because one would want to know these numbers, for example in a sample the age of the youngest and oldest participant. However, if outliers are present it may give a distorted impression of the variability of the data, since only two of the data points are included in making the estimate. Thus, the range is affected by extreme values at each end of the data.