Outlier — Let’s take a deep dive with examples.
Let’s Brush up quickly what we have learnt so far:-
I highly recommend to read the previous blog befor you dive in.
Outlier — An odd & special one out
An outlier can be defined as a data point that deviates significantly from the normal pattern or behavior of the data.
Scenario — 1
Let’s see with an example, the table below shows the number of messages exchanged on the smart phones of 14 students over a single month. The data have also been plotted in a dot plot.
Are there any outliers in this data set? If so, specify the value or values of these outliers.
Answer
If we consider the graph, we can see that one data point at the far right end is a long way from the rest of the data. The value appears to be fairly close to 10 000 and looking in the table we can see that there is one data point with the value 9 754.
Given that the rest of the data appear to have values less than 5 500, we can conclude that 9 754 is an outlier.
Small Exercise
Which of the statements is correct for the distribution represented by the diagram?
- The distribution has an outlier at 6.
