Sunday, July 8, 2012

Statistics Scatter plot

To understand what is a scatter plot in math, lets look at the following example:
Below is the data for X and Y, where X represents number o f hours of study put in by a particular student the previous night, and Y represents his test score the next day morning.

Name of student X = number of hours of study Y = test score (%)
Ann 5 60
Ben 6 70
Carol 8 90
Dan 9 80
Elene 7 70

We are interested in finding if there is any relation between the number hours of study put in the previous night and the test score.
For that, we take a graph sheet and plot the above data as ordered pairs. So the points we would get would be : (5,60), (6,70), (8,90), (9,80), (7,70). Alternatively we can also use and online scatter plot tool to get the graph. The graph would look like below:



A graph such as above is called a scatter plot.
From the graph we see the general trend that if number of hours of study increases, the test score also increases and vice versa. Though it is not possible to find the exact score that the student will get if he studies for say 10 hours, but we can say that most probably the score would be 90 or more if number of hours of study put in is 10.

Applications of scatter plots:
Scatter plot statistics have various applications. Usually a scatter plot is used when the variables under consideration can be controlled by us. The independent variable is also called the control parameter and that is plotted along the x axis. The dependent variable is usually plotted along the y axis.
A scatter plot helps us to derive some relation between the variables. This relation can be of various types, liner, quadratic, inverse, logarithmic or exponential etc. Based on how the points are flowing, we can predict a relation. For the above example the relation can be linear.
For example, a scatter plot on line of regression would give us the deviation of the data from the proposed regression line or the line of control. A scatter plot is also used in comparing two sets of data. When relation between the variables is not linear, the scatter plot is most useful. By merely plotting the scatter plot of the data we can see what kind of a relation the two variables could have.

Scatter plots could be learned over the net through scatter plot online as well.

Know more about the Statistics help,  Statistics homework Help. This article gives basic information about Scatter plot. Next article will cover more statistics concept and its advantages,problems and many more. Please share your comments.

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