Worksheet 8: When means mislead

Worksheet 8: When means mislead#

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  1. Multi-modal data. For each of the following statistics, say whether or not you think it will be influenced by multi-modal data, and explain why.

    a. The median.

    b. Quantiles.

    c. Standard deviation.

  2. Could the COVID symptom data be multimodal? Suppose we make a recommendation for isolation time after close contact based on this data—in what sense is this problematic? What are the tradeoffs that we have to make?

  3. Why does the “rich get richer” phenomenon lead to skew in datasets?

  4. In the presence of outliers, what should we use as an alternative measurement of variability?