Descriptive Statistics Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Descriptive Statistics - Case Study Example This would look like a promising finding because it is higher than the current trend on the mean number of weeks that a prostate cancer patient lives after receiving a confirmed diagnosis of being in stage 4 which is 9.6, with a standard deviation of 3.2. Unfortunately, the data contains an extreme point in this instance, which is 45 and this would certainly draw the mean upwards (Doty, 1996), thereby misrepresenting the behavior of the data. It can also be observed that the standard deviation is unusually high, and since it measures the approximate distance of the data values from the mean (Black, 2010), this indicates that the data set is highly variable. In order to provide a more appropriate interpretation of the behavior of the data, the research team may choose to eliminate this extreme point. This is usually done when a data set contains a minimum number of extreme values that affect the results when the mean is used to interpret it (Fink, 2003). Based on the new calculations made once the value of 45 is removed, the data set will now have a mean of 7.64 and a standard deviation of 2.4. Clearly, such results are lower than the current trend.