2.

You want to find a measure of central tendency for income of persons who have boarded
a particular train on a particular date at the originating station. What measure will you use
and why? What measure will you choose for dispersion and why?
Measure of central tendency tells information about the center, or middle part, of a group of
numbers. It does not focus on the span of the data set or how far values are from the middle
numbers. The measures of central tendency for ungrouped data are the mode, the median, the
mean, percentiles, and quartiles.
Here, in the above, given problem, the most appropriate measure of central tendency for income
of person who has boarded a particular train on a particular data at the originating station is
MEDIAN.
Median: The median is the middle value in an ordered array of numbers. For an array with an
odd number of terms, the median is the middle number. For an array with an even number of
terms, the median is the average of the two middle numbers.
Firstly, since the above given situation will be under ungrouped data, median can be used to find
out the income of the persons. Here, in order to find income of persons who boarded train, the
median will remain unaffected by the magnitude of extreme values. This characteristic is an
advantage, because large and small values do not inordinately influence the median.
On similar lines, it is easy to understand and easy to calculate, especially of individual
observations and ungrouped frequency distributions and less affected in case of skewed data.
Suppose, 25 people boarded the train from one station, and the average annual income of the
persons is 60,849 (in 100s). By surveying, we can find out the actual annual income of those 25
persons,
17,305
25,676
12,500

478,32
0
28,906
33,855

34,983 36,540
32,654 98,213
(In 100s)

45,678
12,500
37,450
250,92
1
48,980

18,980
24,540
20,432

17,408
33,450
28,956

36,853
94,024

16,430
35,671

As mentioned earlier, the measure of central tendency consist of Mean, Median and Mode/
So, if we find out the mean of the given income it will be total incomes/no. of persons in the
train= average annual income

To find out median, we can see that the median (the middle number) is 37,450. From the same
list, you can see that 12,500 is the only income that occurs more than once. So, the mode is
12,500.
Technically, to find out the average generally defined mean is used. However, in the above, given
situation, the three measures of central tendency Mean: 60,849 Median: 33,450 Mode: 12,500 it
seems clear that the median is most representative. The mean is inflated by the two highest
salaries.
Measure of Dispersion
A measure of dispersion gives an idea about the extent of lack of uniformity in the sizes and
quality of the items. Here, in the above given situation, the measure of dispersion I will choose
is Interquartile range.
The interquartile range is the range of values between the first and third quartile. Essentially, it is
the range of the middle 50% of the data and is determined by computing the value of Q3 - Q1.
The interquartile range is especially useful in situations where data users are more interested in
values toward the middle and less interested in extremes. . The important advantage of
interquartile range is that it can be used as a measure of variability if the extreme values are not
being recorded exactly (as in case of open-ended class intervals in the frequency distribution