Question 1 – Chapter 4 Several methods of displaying and exploring data were presented in Chapter 4. Which one did you find the most useful to use and interpret? Discuss and explain why.

Methods of Displaying and Exploring Data

Among the methods of displaying and exploring data the most useful to use and interpret was dot plot. A dot plot is a histogram-like chart which is used in statistics to present data a distribution of numerical variables which are relatively small. A dot plot displays each observation as a dot along a horizontal number line and indicates the likely data values (Lind, Marchal, & Wathen, 2012). What is more impressive about the dot plot is that it relies on sorting of data and it does this automatically. In addition, they are similar to frequency tables but they are much easier to create and interpret because the data are seen much easier than in the frequency table as the range and extreme values can be easily identified. As soon as the axis is chosen plotting of the data points is done randomly and the plotting process sorts the data points automatically. Also, the data used in a dot plot is univariate or data with one variable and makes it easy to count through values to find the median.

Reference

Lind, D., Marchal, W., & Wathen, S. (2012). Basic Statistics for Business and Economics. Pennsylvania: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.