University of Southern Caribbean

BA/BSc Programme
Stat 285- Elementary Statistics

LECTURER : Kenata Daniel

e-mail : Stat1255@gmail.com
Days: Tuesday and Thursday

Unit 2: Organising Data

Learning Goals:
Students should be able to:
 Define raw data
 Organise and graph qualitative data
 Organise and graph quantitative data
 Draw histograms and interpret the various shapes
 Draw a cumulative frequency curve
 Prepare and interpret stem and leaf displays

What is Raw Data?

This is data that is recorded in the sequence in which they are collected and before they are
processed or ranked. For example the ages of 50 students in STAT 285 at USC can be seen
in the table below

21 19 24 25 29 34 26 27 3
18 20 19 22 33 45 50 22 2
25 19 31 19 23 18 23 19 2
22 28 21 20 22 22 21 20 1
25 23 18 37 27 23 21 25 2

Note the information presented above is also called ungrouped data. An ungrouped data set
contains information on each member of a sample or population individually

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 Data sets can be organized into tables, and data can be displayed using graphs. In order for us to
list qualitative data along with its respective categories we can use a frequency distribution.
A frequency distribution for qualitative data lists all categories and the number of elements that
belong to each of the categories.
Ex
 A sample of 28 students from USC elementary statistics class was selected, and they
were asked to express their views on the subject. The responses of the students were
recorded as follows Dislike, like and Open.


Like Open Like Open Open 

Dislike Open Dislike Dislike

Dislike Like Like Open Like 

Dislike Like Open Open Open 

Open Open Like Like Open 

Open Open Like Open 

 Construct a frequency distribution from the given data.

Relative Frequency and Percentage Distributions

We can calculate the relative frequency of a category by using the following formula

Likewise the relative percentage can be calculated using

For the given data above calculate the relative frequency and percentage distributions.

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Graphical Presentation of Qualitative Data

 Typical presentations used are the bar graph and the pie charts.

 A graph made of bars whose heights represent the frequencies of respective categories is
called a bar graph

 Similarly, a circle divided into portions that represent the relative frequencies or percentages of
a population or a sample belonging to different categories is called a pie chart.

 ORGANIZING AND GRAPHING QUANTITATIVE DATA


 Frequency Distributions
 Constructing Frequency Distribution Tables
 Relative and Percentage Distributions
 Graphing Grouped Data
 Histograms
 Polygons

Frequency Distributions

 A frequency distribution for quantitative data lists all the classes and the number of
values that belong to each class. Data presented in the form of a frequency distribution
are called grouped data. For example

 Note

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 


 The class boundary is given by the midpoint of the upper limit of one class and the lower
limit of the next class.


A histogram is a graph in which classes are marked on the horizontal axis and the frequencies,
relative frequencies, or percentages are marked on the vertical axis. The frequencies, relative
frequencies, or percentages are represented by the heights of the bars. In a histogram, the bars are
drawn adjacent to each other

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  Similarly a graph formed by joining the midpoints of the tops of successive bars in a
histogram with straight lines is called a polygon.

SHAPES OF HISTOGRAMS

1. Symmetric

2. Skewed (a) A histogram skewed to the right. (b) A histogram skewed to the left.

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 3. Uniform or rectangular

CUMULATIVE FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTIONS

 A cumulative frequency distribution gives the total number of values that fall below the
upper boundary of each class.

 An ogive is a curve drawn for the cumulative frequency distribution by joining with
straight lines the dots marked above the upper boundaries of classes at heights equal to
the cumulative frequencies of respective classes.

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 STEM-AND-LEAF DISPLAYS

In a stem-and-leaf display of quantitative data, each value is divided into two portions by
a vertical line into a stem and a leaf. The leaves for each stem are shown separately in a display.

Constructing a Stem and Leaf plot

Step 1 First take the stem to be the digits in the tens place value

Step 2. Enter the digits vertically in numerical order starting from the smallest,
under the stem column

Step 3 Working down one column at a time in the given data, starting from the first
column enter each digit in the ones place value under the leaf column in
its corresponding row, so that each two–digit number retains its value.

Step 4 Arrange the digits under the leaf in ascending order

Step 5 Finally make a key.

The following information can be extracted from a stem-and-leaf display

 The highest and lowest data point

 The pattern of the data
 The mode
 The median
 Quartiles

Advantages of a stem plot

 It is easy and quick to construct

 It is suitable for displaying a small set of data
 The data is arranged compactly
 A diagram that looks like a histogram can easily be obtained from a stem and leaf
plot.

Percentiles

The nth percentile of a data set divides the bottom n% of data values from the top (100 – n)
%. Percentile of data value = (no. of values less than this data values / total no. of values in
data set) x 100. For example, the median is the 50th percentile while the 25th percentile is
the lower quartile.

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Percentile Rank

A percentile rank is typically defined as the proportion of scores in a distribution that a

specific score is greater than or equal to. For instance, if you received a score of 95 on a
math test and this score were greater than or equal to the scores of 88% of the students
taking the test then your percentile rank would be 88. You would be in the 88th percentile.

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