

However, the mathematics are very complex when using it in subsequent statistical analysis. The average deviation is not very difficult to calculate, and it is intuitively appealing. If this method is used, the absolute value of the difference is taken so that only positive values are obtained, and the result sometimes is called the mean absolute deviation. However, performing this calcuation will result in an average deviation of zero since the values above the mean will cancel the values below the mean. To calcuate the average deviation (mean deviation). Average DeviationĪnother method is to calculate the average difference between each data point and the mean value, and divide by the number of points However, the range only provides information about the maximum and minimum values and does not say anything about the values in between. The range is calculated by simply taking the difference between the maximum and minimum values in the data set. The simplest measure of dispersion is the range. Dispersion measures include the range, average deviation, variance, and standard deviation.

Measures of dispersion provide a more complete picture. For example, a residential street with 20 homes on it having a mean value of $200,000 with little variation from the mean would be very different from a street with the same mean home value but with 3 homes having a value of $1 million and the other 17 clustered around $60,000. Without knowing something about how data is dispersed, measures of central tendency may be misleading.
