MSG Team's other articles

9684 How the Pandemic is a Nightmare for Small Businesses and Ways to Help Them

How the Economic Crisis Due to the Covid Pandemic Has Been Disastrous for the SMEs While the Covid 19 Pandemic has been hard on all, including businesses, individuals, and other entities, it has been nightmarish for Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs. This is because the SMEs typically operate on a smaller scale when compared […]

8775 Production and Operations Management – Meaning and Important Concepts

Introduction The very essence of any business is to cater needs of customer by providing services and goods, and in process create value for customers and solve their problems. Production and operations management talks about applying business organization and management concepts in creation of goods and services. Production Production is a scientific process which involves […]

10734 The Problem with Modicare

The Union Budget is a big financial event in India. Each year, the finance minister of the nation sets the national priorities and also the plan to fund them. The 2018 budget came in as a shocker for most people in India. The middle class was hoping for a significant tax reduction. However, there was […]

9486 Government Spending vs. Government Taxation

The state of the American economy is deteriorating at a rapid pace. This is large because of the indiscriminate spending being undertaken by the American government. In order to understand the true scale of this spending, let’s have a look at some numbers. In 1987, the entire budget controlled by the United States government amounted […]

9454 Global Economy – Meaning and its Salient Aspects

The other modules discuss the phenomenon of globalization and the ongoing global economic crisis among other topics. This module is intended to discuss the salient aspects of the global economy including the structural features and the way in which several competing trends and factors influence the workings of the global economy. For instance, the global […]

Search with tags

  • No tags available.

Converting Data to Information: The goal of a six sigma project is not to produce an overwhelming amount of data that ends up intimidating the concerned people. The goal is to find out as much data as possible and convert it into meaningful information that can be used by the concerned personnel to make meaningful decisions about the process. However for that one needs to learn how to statistically deal with huge amounts of data.

Data primarily needs to be understood for its two characteristics viz central tendency and dispersion. Data tends to be centred around a point known as average. The degree to which it is spread out from that point is also important because it has an important bearing on the probability. It is for this reason that we use the following characteristics to make sense of the data involved:

Measures of Central Tendency: Different types of data need different measures of central tendency. Some of the important measures, commonly used are as follows:

  • Mean: This is most probably the arithmetic mean or simply the average of the data points involved. It could also be the geometric or harmonic mean however that is unusual. This is the most popular measure of central tendency. Many statistical techniques have evolved that use the mean as the primary measure to understand the centrality of a given set of data points.

  • Median: If all the data points given in a particular data set were arranged in ascending or descending order, the value in the centre is called the median. In case where data sets have an odd number of elements like 7, the median is the 4th item because it has 3 data points on each side. In case the number is even like 8, then the median is the average of 4th and 5th data point. Median is used where there are outliers i.e. big numbers that impact the mean giving a false picture of the data involved.

  • Mode: This is the value of the most frequently occurring item in the data set. This is the value of the most expected number to occur.

Measures of Dispersion: The degree of spread determines the probability and the level of confidence that one can have on the results obtained from the measures of central tendency. Common measures of dispersion are as follows:

  • Range: The two endpoints between which all the values of a data set fall is called a range. It is important because it exhaustively includes all the possibilities.

  • Quartiles: The data set is divided into 4 sets and the number of elements is each set is studied to give us data about quartiles. Similar measures include the deciles and the percentiles. However quartiles remain most widely used.

  • Standard Deviation: A complex formula is used to work out standard deviation of a given set of data. However standard deviation is like the mean, it is the most important measure of dispersion and is used exhaustively in almost every statistical technique.

Article Written by

MSG Team

An insightful writer passionate about sharing expertise, trends, and tips, dedicated to inspiring and informing readers through engaging and thoughtful content.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

Causes of Measurement Variation

MSG Team

Steps Involved in Conducting a Measurement System Analysis

MSG Team

Six Sigma – Outputs in the Measure Phase

MSG Team